President Donald Trump announced that his administration intends to lift wide-ranging sanctions on Syria during a speech on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia.
“In Syria, which has seen so much misery and death, there is a new government that will hopefully will succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace,” Trump said. “I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness.” Trump said that Syria deserves “a fresh start.”
That new beginning does not, however, include an end to the U.S. occupation of Syrian territory, according to the Pentagon. Around 1,000 U.S. troops are currently stationed in the country.
The U.S. military has been operating in Syria for many years as part of its complex and often muddled military efforts in the region. America’s bases ostensibly exist to conduct “counter-ISIS missions,” but experts say they are also as a check against Iran. The outposts have come under frequent attack in recent years and have also been targeted for thefts by militias and criminal gangs.
Late last year, the government of Bashar al-Assad was toppled after a rapid offensive by rebel forces led by Syria’s current interim president, Ahmed al-Shara. Last month, reports emerged that the U.S. was shuttering three of its eight small outposts in Syria.
Experts say that withdrawing U.S. troops from a handful of bases in Syria is now long overdue and necessary to effect a real change in strategy and policy for the region.
“Over 1,000 U.S. troops remain stuck in Syria without a clear mission or timetable to return.”
“Lifting sanctions on Syria is a positive step — but sanctions aren’t the only holdover policy from the Assad days that the U.S. should revisit,” said Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for more restrained U.S. foreign policy. “Over 1,000 U.S. troops remain stuck in Syria without a clear mission or timetable to return. They’re a legacy of the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but that would-be ‘caliphate’ was defeated and lost all its territory over 5 years ago. It’s time for those troops to come home.”
When asked if the U.S. was planning a withdrawal of forces from Syria, a Pentagon spokesperson referred The Intercept to an April statement that announced “the U.S. footprint in Syria” would drop “down to less than a thousand U.S. forces in the coming months,” but would not end entirely.
“The Department of Defense continues to maintain a significant amount of capability in the region and the ability to make dynamic force posture adjustments based on evolving security situations on the ground,” the statement reads.
On Wednesday, Trump spoke for about half an hour with al-Shara, whom he called a “young, attractive guy.” Trump also referred to the Syrian president’s “strong past” and called him a “fighter.” Al-Shara is designated as a terrorist by the U.S. government for his former affiliation with Al Qaeda.
Trump also encouraged al-Shara to “tell all foreign terrorists to leave Syria”; help the U.S. prevent the resurgence of ISIS; and sign on to the Abraham Accords, a 2020 Trump-brokered pact that established formal ties between Israel and four Arab countries, among other recommendations, according to a statement on X by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Fear of an ISIS revival has been the long-standing argument for keeping U.S. troops in Syria. Kelanic pointed to the recent history of Afghanistan as an argument against claims that the U.S. needs to have boots on the ground to counter any ISIS resurgence.
“The big argument against the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was that we would see a resurgence of terrorism from al-Qaeda or ISIS. But the U.S hasn’t been targeted by terrorism from Afghanistan,” Kelanic told The Intercept. “The U.S. has detected plots by ISIS-Khorasan, which operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Iran and Russia and warned those countries ahead of time. We’re able to still detect what’s going on with extremely sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities without having boots on the ground.”
The White House did not respond for a request for comment concerning the continued U.S. troop presence in Syria.
A recent investigation by The Intercept found that U.S. troops in the Middle East have come under attack close to 400 times, at a minimum, since the outbreak of the Israel–Hamas war, according to figures provided by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Central Command. This amounts to roughly one attack every 1.5 days, on average.
“Having these troops in Syria … It’s like we’re giving them hostages to take if they see fit.”
The strikes, predominantly by Iranian-backed militias and — prior to a ceasefire signed last week — the Houthi government in Yemen, include a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and ballistic missiles fired at fixed bases and U.S. warships across the region. These groups ramped up attacks on U.S. targets in October 2023, in response to the U.S.-supported Israeli war on Gaza.
“About 200” of those attacks have been on U.S. bases, according to Pentagon spokesperson Patricia Kreuzberger. Around 50 percent occurred in Syria.
“Having these troops in Syria puts them at risk of retaliation from Iran and others,” said Kelanic. “It’s like we’re giving them hostages to take if they see fit, without there being a particularly compelling reason for these troops to be there.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is calling for President Trump’s pick for Under Secretary of the Army to sell his stock in a defense contractor that experts say would pose a clear conflict of interest.
In a federal ethics agreement first reported by The Intercept, Michael Obadal, Trump’s pick for the second most powerful post at the Army, acknowledged held equity in Anduril Industries, where he has worked for two years as an executive. Obadal said that contrary to ethics norms, he will not divest his stock, which he valued at between $250,000 and $500,000.
In a letter shared with The Intercept in advance of Obadal’s confirmation hearing Thursday, Warren, D-Mass., says Obadal must divest from Anduril, calling the current arrangement a “textbook conflict of interest.”
“By attempting to serve in this role with conflicts of interest, you risk spending taxpayer dollars on wasteful DoD contracts that enrich wealthy contractors but fail to enhance Americans’ national security.”
Warren, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, writes that Obadal’s stock holdings “will compromise your ability to serve with integrity, raising a cloud of suspicion over your contracting and operational decision.”
“By attempting to serve in this role with conflicts of interest, you risk spending taxpayer dollars on wasteful DoD contracts that enrich wealthy contractors but fail to enhance Americans’ national security,” Warren writes.
A more detailed financial disclosure form obtained by The Intercept shows Anduril is not the full extent of Obadal’s military investments. According to this document, a retirement investment account belonging to Obadal holds stock in both General Dynamics, which does billions of dollars of business with the Army, and Howmet Aerospace, a smaller firm. While nominees are not required to list the precise value of such investments, Obadal says his holdings in General Dynamics and Howmet are worth between $2,000 and $30,000.
Don Fox, former acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, told The Intercept that neither stock should be exempt from conflict of interest considerations under federal law. “The fact that they are within either a traditional or Roth IRA doesn’t impact the conflict of interest analysis,” he said. “Not sure why he would be allowed to keep those.”
“A DoD contractor is a DoD contractor,” said Fox. “The degree of their business with DoD or what they do isn’t material. A lot of people were surprised for example that Disney was/is a DoD contractor. For a Senate confirmation position they would have had to divest.”
In addition to these defense contractors, Obadal holds stock in other corporations that do business with the Pentagon, including Microsoft, Amazon, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Cummins, which manufactures diesel engines for the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle. None of these companies are mentioned in Obadal’s ethics letter detailing which assets he will and won’t dispose of if confirmed. In his more detailed disclosure document, known as a Form 278, Obadal explicitly notes he will be able to exercise his shares in Anduril “if there is an equity event such as the sale of the company, or the company becoming a publicly-traded entity,” potentially netting him a large payout. Anduril was most recently reported to be valued by private investors at over $28 billion.
In addition to divesting from Anduril, Warren’s letter asks Obadal to get rid of the stocks in these other firms, commit to recusing himself entirely from any Anduril-related matters at the Army, and pledge to avoid working for or lobbying on behalf of the defense sector for a period of four years after leaving the Department of Defense. “By making these commitments, you would increase Americans’ trust in your ability to serve the public interest during your time at the Army,” Warren writes, “rather than the special interests of large DoD contractors.”
The White House unveiled a barebones budget blueprint last week that would pump more of the federal budget into the Pentagon while taking a chainsaw to education, foreign aid, health care and public assistance programs.
While some analysts claim that the outline, also known as a “skinny budget,” represents a modest cut to Pentagon spending, that fails to take into account the White House’s call for $119 billion in defense spending to be included in a reconciliation bill currently being debated in Congress. With that added to the base budget proposal, which keeps the Pentagon budget at roughly the same $893 billion level as last year, total defense spending would increase by 13 percent to $1 trillion.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a personal adviser to the president, claimed that he would cut costs at the Pentagon with his minions at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Instead, experts say that, if approved, Donald Trump’s bloated Pentagon budget will almost certainly benefit Musk and his company SpaceX with huge new projects.
The first is a missile shield, dubbed the Golden Dome, which is reminiscent of the Reagan-era “Star Wars” missile-defense boondoggle. Trump’s budget plan also calls for an undisclosed flood of funding for “U.S. space dominance to strengthen U.S. national security.”
“No matter how you slice it, the Pentagon budget is obscenely high at a time when the fundamentals of our diplomatic infrastructure are being decimated, the social safety net is being shredded, and medical and scientific research are under attack,” William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told The Intercept. “Add to this that the funds for the Pentagon have as much to do with pork barrel politics and techno-fantasies like the Golden Dome as they do with a sound defense strategy, and it becomes clear that current resources going to the Pentagon are not only excessive but are more likely to undermine than promote our security.”
“Current resources going to the Pentagon are not only excessive but are more likely to undermine than promote our security.”
Trump’s Golden Dome appears to be little more than a warmed-over version of the 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative, a fanciful project that hoped to shoot down Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, retitled with a name swiped from Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense. Its ultimate price tag is estimated in the hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars.
Musk’s SpaceX has emerged as a front-runner to win crucial parts of the Golden Dome project, which aims to build a network of satellites to detect and track missiles streaking toward the United States. SpaceX not only manufactures rockets that can launch military payloads into space, but also satellites that can provide surveillance and targeting technology. The firm is already the top Pentagon supplier of launch services and low-Earth-orbit communications systems.
Unlike Israel’s Iron Dome, which defends that tiny country against short-range threats, America’s Golden Dome would need to cover a much larger area against a more challenging range of weapons, including ICBMs and hypersonic missiles. Even if blanketing the United States with these defenses were economically feasible, the technology isn’t.
“The Golden Dome is basically a fantasy,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending. Israel’s system needs to defend just 8,500 square miles, while the U.S. system needs to cover 3.8 million. “Physicists say that this technology to defend against ICBMs and hypersonic missiles doesn’t exist. Funneling tens, perhaps hundreds, of billions of dollars into technology with only a faint hope of success is extremely wasteful.”
SpaceX has proposed providing its Golden Dome technology to the Defense Department through a “subscription service,” according to reporting by Reuters. Pentagon officials and experts have expressed concerns about this unusual model for a critical defense program, which runs the risk of leading to cost overruns and a lack of oversight and control over the program.
“Building 600 to 1,200 satellites doesn’t mean you can actually defend the United States against ICBMs and hypersonic missiles.”
“With his subscription model plan, Musk is looking to both retain control of these systems and keep taxpayer dollars flowing his way,” said Murphy. “But just like a blue check mark doesn’t make you famous, building 600 to 1,200 satellites doesn’t mean you can actually defend the United States against ICBMs and hypersonic missiles.”
A group of 42 Democratic lawmakers has already called for a review by the Pentagon’s acting inspector general of Musk’s role in the bidding process for the missile defense shield.
“Mr. Musk, in addition to his role at SpaceX, is a Special Government Employee (SGE), Senior Advisor to President Trump, and a key official at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),” the lawmakers wrote. “Mr. Musk’s formal or informal participation in any process to award a government contract raises serious conflict of interest concerns, including the possibility that SpaceX is a top contender for the Golden Dome contract because of Mr. Musk’s position in the government.” If the inspector general launches an inquiry and finds Musk provided an advantage to SpaceX in the bidding process, the lawmakers requested the findings be referred to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation.
SpaceX broke into major defense contracting through the courts. In 2014, the company sued the Air Force after it awarded a sole-source contract for rocket launches to a Boeing–Lockheed Martin joint venture called United Launch Alliance, arguing that opening the contract up to competition could save the government hundreds of millions of dollars per launch. SpaceX prevailed, and now has, according to many observers, a near-monopoly on the U.S. satellite launch market.
SpaceX’s chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said the company has about $22 billion in government contracts, mostly from NASA. But SpaceX’s deals with the Pentagon have ballooned — totaling almost $8 billion — as it has provided an increasing number of services to the Defense Department.
NASA is slated for a budget cut under Trump’s plan, but SpaceX is still likely to win big. Trump’s budget blueprint takes aim at the old guard of the military–industrial complex, including the rivals SpaceX displaced to gain its foothold at the Pentagon. Trump is calling for NASA to end funding for the Space Launch System, a massive Boeing and Northrop Grumman rocket, and Lockheed Martin’s Orion astronaut capsule, which was to be employed to take the U.S. back to the moon.
SpaceX recently won an $843 million contract to “de-orbit” the International Space Station when it is retired in 2030. Musk urged Trump to speed up its demise and focus on his own pet project, posting on his own website, X.com: “Let’s go to Mars.”
To that end, Trump’s cancellation of key parts of NASA’s lunar program allows for a Mars-focused agenda. His budget blueprint also calls for $1 billion in new spending to specifically focus on a mission to the red planet.
Colonizing Mars has long been one of Musk’s leading obsessions. Cutting the United States out of the equation and violating international law appears to be part of his plan. The terms of service agreement for SpaceX’s Starlink internet service offers up a Wild West vision for that planet:
“For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.”
SpaceX is already taking aim at Mars with its heavy-lift Starship rocket, and Musk is publicly calling for “direct, rather than representative, democracy” on the planet. “The Martians will decide how they are ruled,” he wrote on X late last year. But the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, under which the United Nations declared a set of principles for space, unequivocally states that outer space is “the province of all mankind” and subject to international law.
“This is an unelected billionaire who is taking a sledgehammer to essential programs for diplomacy and basic support for Americans in need.”
Trump’s indulgence of Musk’s Martian fantasies with U.S. tax dollars, Musk’s billions in contracts with NASA and the Pentagon, and the additional billions his company stands to reap from Trump’s fantastical Golden Dome project all raise profound pay-to-play issues.
These new contracts and budget priorities are “all coming to a man who spent close to $290 million getting Trump and other Republicans elected. This is an unelected billionaire who is taking a sledgehammer to essential programs for diplomacy and basic support for Americans in need,” Hartung told The Intercept. “The conflict of interest is jaw-dropping, and his power — and how he is wielding it — is obscene.”
U.S. troops in the Middle East have come under attack close to 400 times, at a minimum, since the outbreak of the Israel–Hamas war, according to figures provided to The Intercept by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Central Command.
The strikes, predominantly by Iranian-backed militias and the Houthi government in Yemen, include a mix of one-way attack drones, rockets, mortars, and ballistic missiles fired at fixed bases and U.S. warships across the region. These groups ramped up attacks on U.S. targets in October 2023, in response to the U.S.-supported Israeli war on Gaza.
The casualty revelations come as President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire with the Houthis, claiming they had “capitulated” to the United States. “The Houthis have announced — to us, at least — that they don’t want to fight anymore,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “We will stop the bombings,” he continued, noting that U.S. attacks would end “immediately.”
Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, a member of the Houthi Supreme Political Council, said the Houthis had not immediately agreed to the U.S.-proposed ceasefire. The Houthis would “evaluate” the U.S. proposal “on the ground first,” he posted on Tuesday.
When asked for clarification regarding Trump’s claims, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Trump’s remarks were “clear.”
Houthi strikes on U.S. forces, which began during the Biden administration, continued during Trump’s second term, despite threats that continued attacks would be met with overwhelming force. “To all Houthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!” Trump ranted on TruthSocial on March 15. Trump then decreed that the Houthis would be “completely annihilated.” In what Trump described as “large-scale strikes in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen,” the U.S. targeted civilian infrastructure and, according to local reports, killed scores of innocent people.
The attacks on Yemen have continued with Israel and the United Kingdom joining in the bombardment. More than a month after Trump’s bellicose boasts, however, the Houthis have continued to strike at U.S. military personnel, just as they and militant groups across the Middle East have done hundreds of times since the beginning of the Gaza war.
U.S. Navy vessels in the region have been the most frequent target, coming under attack 174 times since October 2023, Central Command told The Intercept. There have also been “about 200” attacks on U.S. bases in the region since the Gaza war began, according to Pentagon spokesperson Patricia Kreuzberger. This amounts to roughly one attack every 1.5 days, on average. This includes more than 100 attacks on U.S. outposts in Syria and a lesser number in Iraq and Jordan. A January 2024 drone attack on Tower 22, a facility in the latter country, killed three U.S. troops.
The Pentagon recently bragged that it had attacked more than 1,000 Houthi targets since March 15, as part of Operation Rough Rider, while denigrating the Houthis’ ability to strike back at the U.S. military.
Just last week, a $60 million U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter was lost at sea when it fell overboard from the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier. The Truman reportedly made a sharp turn to evade a Houthi attack, which caused the jet to plunge overboard. One sailor was injured in the chaos.
“After a month of Trump’s empty threats to annihilate us, I am responding to you, not from the afterlife, but from this worldly life, specifically from Al-Sab’een Square in the capital, Sana’a,” Nasruddin Amer, a Houthi spokesman, told The Intercept by direct message, calling Trump a laughingstock ahead of the announced ceasefire.
Amer said that Houthi attacks had actually destroyed two F/A-18s. CENTCOM pushed back on this. “Houthis continue to communicate lies and disinformation,” an unnamed “defense official” told The Intercept. “Their messaging depends on lies.”
Amid the rising death toll in Yemen, some lawmakers have been pressing for an end to U.S. attacks. “We cannot bomb our way to peace. As someone who’s seen the human cost of war and displacement. I know we need a foreign policy rooted in human rights,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar on Tuesday as feminist leaders gathered on Capitol Hill to unveil the Feminist Peace Playbook, a foreign policy strategy that runs counter to Trump’s antagonistic approach.
Although he wasted little time in launching his own bombing campaign in Yemen this year, as a presidential candidate, Trump was critical of Biden administration attacks on the Houthis. “It’s crazy. You can solve problems over the telephone. Instead, they start dropping bombs. I see, recently, they’re dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don’t have to do that. You can talk in such a way where they respect you and they listen to you,” Trump said in a May 2024 interview with podcaster Tim Pool.
America’s enemies, specifically Iranian-backed militias, have been striking U.S. bases, intermittently, since the late 2010s. Regular tit-for-tat attacks began in January 2020 when Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani, was killed near the Baghdad airport in a U.S. drone strike authorized by Trump. Trump said the U.S. was “totally prepared” for Iran to retaliate — which it did by firing 22 ballistic missiles at two American bases in Iraq. “All is well!” Trump proclaimed in the wake of the attack, as the U.S. claimed no U.S. troops were killed or wounded. Weeks later, the Pentagon admitted that there were actually 109 U.S. casualties.
Recently, U.S. Central Command, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the White House have orchestrated acasualty cover-up, refusing to disclose the number of U.S. troops killed or wounded in Houthi attacks.
Under the Biden administration, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and CENTCOM provided detailed data on attacks on military bases across the Middle East — including to this reporter. CENTCOM provided the total number of attacks, breakdowns by country, and the total number injured. The Pentagon offered even more granular data, providing individual synopses of more than 150 attacks, including information on deaths and injuries not only to U.S. troops but even civilian contractors working on U.S. bases.
But the administration is unwilling to level with the American people about the costs of war. U.S. Central Command, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the White House are keeping the number of U.S. casualties from this ongoing conflict secret. This amounts to a cover-up. Members of Congress are calling for accountability.
“The administration should be transparent about the number of U.S. casualties from the attacks on the Houthis,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told The Intercept. “I am also working to hold the administration accountable for its unauthorized strikes in Yemen.”
After two decades of intermittent war in Yemen, the U.S. officially launched Operation Rough Rider in March of this year, and has carried out strikes on more than 1,000 targets in Yemen.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has also ramped up conflicts in Iraq, Somalia, and Syria, after running as an anti-war candidate and pitching himself as a “peacemaker.”
U.S. troops are also in harm’s way. Earlier this week, a fighter jet fell off the side of the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier in the Red Sea, the Navy said in a statement on Monday. The Truman reportedly made a sharp turn to evade a Houthi attack, which caused the U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter to plunge overboard. One sailor was injured in the chaos, and the $60 million plane was lost to the deep.
“This was a tragic accident, and let’s be clear — neither this service member, nor any of the other service members in Yemen, should have ever been in harm’s way,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., told The Intercept. “Trump’s strikes in Yemen are unconstitutional and Congress must assert its congressional war powers before another service member is injured in the line of duty.”
How many other military personnel have been killed or wounded in the broader U.S. campaign against the Houthis, which began under the Biden administration, is being withheld from the American public.
When The Intercept asked the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the number of casualties sustained by U.S. forces in the campaign against the Houthis, the Pentagon balked at providing a number. “We refer you to CENTCOM,” an unnamed official wrote in an email, noting in a follow-up response that “it is their operation.”
When The Intercept did as requested and queried Central Command, referencing the Pentagon’s advice, CENTCOM passed the buck: “On background as a defense official, we refer you to The White House.” Repeated requests to White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers have gone unanswered.
This is not standard operating procedure.
Under the Biden administration, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and CENTCOM provided detailed data on attacks on military bases across the Middle East — including to this reporter. CENTCOM provided the total number of attacks, breakdowns by country, and the total number injured. The Pentagon offered even more granular data, providing individual synopses of more than 150 attacks, including information on deaths and injuries not only to U.S. troops but even civilian contractors working on U.S. bases.
“Withholding basic information from the public makes it harder for the media to shine light on how these officials are violating one of Trump’s most broadly popular campaign promises,” Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy, told The Intercept. “These operatives apparently hope that by waging a war from the air without constitutionally required authorization from Congress, they can keep the public in the dark about the devastating impact of their war.”
The Pentagon acknowledges the danger to U.S. forces posed by Houthi attacks. “They threaten our personnel overseas,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in March, noting that the Houthis were “firing at U.S. military personnel in the region and shooting at our ships … putting American lives at risk.”
The Defense Department not only failed to provide a count of those for whom those risks were realized, but also seemed to suggest that they are not even aware of how many personnel may have been killed or wounded by the Houthis.
When asked if the Pentagon even knew that number, a nameless spokesperson intimated that the information was only known to CENTCOM. “That information is tracked at the combatant command level,” the official replied by email.
Trump’s nominee for under secretary of the Army, Michael Obadal, retired from a career in the Army in 2023, then spent the past two years working for Anduril, the ascendant arms maker with billions of dollars in Army contracts.
If confirmed to the Pentagon post — often described as the “chief operating officer” position at the largest branch of the U.S. military — Obadal plans to keep his stock in Anduril, according to an ethics disclosure reviewed by The Intercept.
“This is unheard of for a presidential appointee in the Defense Department to retain a financial interest in a defense contractor,” said Richard Painter, the top White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration. Painter said that while the arrangement may not be illegal, it certainly creates the appearance of a conflict of interest. Under the norms of prior administrations, Painter said, “nobody at upper echelons of the Pentagon would be getting anywhere near contracts if he’s sitting on a pile of defense contractor stock.”
Obadal has been a senior director at Anduril since 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile, following a nearly 30-year career in the U.S. Army. While the revolving door between the Pentagon and defense industry is as old as both of those institutions, federal law and ethical norms require employees of the executive branch to unload financial interests and relationships that might create a conflict of interest in the course of their duties.
Obadal’s April 11 financial disclosure letter, filed with the Office of Government Ethics, states “Upon confirmation, I will resign from my position as Senior Director at Anduril Industries” and forfeit his right to unvested stock options. But crucially, Obadal says he will retain his restricted stock units that have already vested — i.e., Anduril stock he already owns. That means he will continue to own a piece of the company, whose valuation has reportedly increased from $8.5 billion when Obadal joined to $28 billion today on the strength of its military contracts, and stands to materially benefit from anything that helps Anduril.
In his ethics letter, Obadal says he “will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter that to my knowledge has a direct and predictable effect on the financial interests of Anduril Industries” — unless he’s given permission by his boss, the secretary of the Army.
Don Fox, former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, told The Intercept Obadal’s Anduril shares could pose a clear conflict of interest if he is confirmed. “The general reason an appointee would be allowed to maintain a potentially conflicting interest is because divestiture is either not possible or highly impractical.” Anduril is privately held, meaning shares in the company can’t be quickly disposed of on the stock market.
But Painter, the Bush-era ethics lawyer, suggests that Obadal could liquidate his stake in Anduril through the lively secondary market in its shares. “In the Bush years, we’d just say ‘You’re not going to the Pentagon,” said Painter.
Fox said that if Obadal adheres to what’s in his ethics agreement and recuses himself from anything that touches Anduril, he will stay in compliance with federal law. “That’s going to be a pretty broad recusal,” added Painter, who speculated, “He’s going to have to recuse from any weapons systems that might use [Anduril] equipment, anything having to do with contracts, even competitor companies.”
Fox, who spent decades as a lawyer at the Air Force and Navy, speculated that a vast recusal from budgetary matters “is feasible, but he’s going to have to be really scrupulous about it,” to the point of literally leaving the room whenever Anduril, its capabilities, or those of its competitors are discussed. “Once we get into areas that involve hardware and software, I’d say don’t even be in the room,” he said. “At a really senior level, people are not only looking for what you say but what you don’t say,” Fox added. “It poses a significant risk to him personally of crossing that line, no matter how scrupulous he may be.”
William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft who focuses on the U.S. arms industry, describes the situation as “the very definition of a conflict of interest” given the vast business interests between Obadal’s current and new employer. “The fact that the administration and the Congress have accepted this arrangement is a commentary on the sad state of ethics in Washington — an indication that too many of our elected officials won’t even try to take steps to make it harder to engage in corrupt practices,” Hartung added.
As its second-highest ranking civilian at the Army, Obadal will have considerable sway over what weapons the Army purchases, what technologies it prioritizes, and when and how the U.S. wages war. Having a former employee and current shareholder in that position may prove lucrative for Anduril as the company seeks to add to its billions of dollars of federal contracts.
In the past year alone, during Obadal’s time at the company, Anduril announced it was taking over the Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System, a troubled $22 billion program intended to provide soldiers with augmented reality goggles and selling the Army components for its rocket artillery systems and a fleet of miniature “Ghost-X” helicopter drones. Anduril is also working on the Army’s TITAN system, a truck-mounted sensor suite, and an experimental U.S. Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle program.
Last year, DefenseOne reported that the Army’s “unfunded priorities” tech wishlist included “$4.5 million in research and development for Anduril’s Roadrunner-M drone interceptor.” Obadal described that jet-powered bomb drone in a LinkedIn post as “revolutionary.”
The White House declined to comment on the ethics agreement and referred The Intercept to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which also declined to comment and referred The Intercept to the Army, which referred The Intercept back to the White House. Neither Anduril nor Obadal responded to a request for comment.
Even amid a rightward turn for the tech industry, Anduril stands out for its MAGA-alignment and closeness to the Trump administration of its top executives and investors.
In December, the New York Times reported Trump’s transition team offices were “crawling with executives from defense tech firms with close ties to Mr. Trump’s orbit,” including Anduril. The month before, Anduril co-founder and longtime Trump booster Palmer Luckey told Bloomberg he was already “in touch” with the incoming administration about impending nominees: “I don’t want to throw any (names) out there because I would be happy with all of them.”
When a tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon 50 years ago today, the Potemkin state of South Vietnam collapsed, and the Vietnamese war of independence, fought in its final phase against the overwhelming military might of the United States, came to a close.
America lost its war, but Vietnam was devastated. “Sideshow” wars in Cambodia and Laos left those countries equally ravaged. The United States unleashed an estimated 30 billion pounds of munitions in Southeast Asia. At least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths, an estimated 11.7 million South Vietnamese were forced from their homes, and up to 4.8 million were sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange.
April 30, 1975, was also, the New Yorker’s Jonathan Schell observed at the time, “the first day since September 1, 1939, when the Second World War began, that something like peace reigned throughout the world.”
Peace on paper, perhaps, but the violence never really ended.
With a South Vietnamese flag at his feet, a victorious North Vietnamese soldier waves a Communist flag from a tank outside Independence Palace in Saigon, April 30, 1975, the day the South Vietnamese government surrendered, ending the Vietnam War.Photo: Yves Billy/AP
The U.S. did whatever it could to cripple the reunited Vietnam. Instead of delivering billions in promised reconstruction aid, it pressured international lenders like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to reject Vietnamese requests for assistance. The newly unified nation of farmers had no choice but to till rice fields filled with unexploded American bombs, artillery shells, rockets, cluster munitions, landmines, grenades, and more.
The war’s toll continued to rise, with 100,000 more casualties in Vietnam in the 50 years since the conflict technically came to a close and many more in the neighboring nations of Southeast Asia.
After all that, America could have learned something.
At the cost of over 58,000 American lives and $1 trillion, at current value, America’s shocking defeat at the hands of South Vietnamese guerrillas and soldiers from what then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a “little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam” could have led to lasting change. The U.S. might have grappled with the suffering it inflicted across Southeast Asia and pledged not to turn another region of the world into a charnel house and a munitions scrapyard. The people who led the U.S. to war and those who have assumed power since then could have absorbed how dangerous hubris can be; the inability of military might to achieve political aims; and the terrible costs of unleashing devastating firepower on a tiny nation. They could have grasped the merits of restrained foreign policy.
For a very brief moment, Congress did attempt to require human rights concerns to factor into American foreign policy. That urge soon evaporated.
Instead, America turned a blind eye to continued deaths in Vietnam and backed a genocidal regime in neighboring Cambodia to further injure the country with whom it had just made peace. Then the U.S. quickly doubled down, setting in motion a means to turn its humiliating defeat in Southeast Asia into a 20-year war in Southwest Asia, against even weaker opponents, that ended in another mortifying loss.
A U.S. Marine stands with Vietnamese children as they watch their house burn 25 miles south of Da Nang, Vietnam after an Allied patrol set it ablaze after finding communist AK-47 ammunition, Jan. 13, 1971.Photo: HJ/AP
“We were taught that our armies were always invincible, and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam,” President Jimmy Carter observed in his famous “malaise speech” on July 15, 1979, while paradoxically claiming that the “outward strength of America” was unequaled. The United States was, he said, “a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.”
But even as he mouthed those words to the American people, Carter was setting in motion secret operations that sowed the seeds for a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 9/11 attacks, and more than two decades of forever wars. America would trade one agony for another, making rash choices that would inflict pain on its own people and devastation across another entire region.
On July 3, 1979, Carter authorized the CIA to provide covert aid to insurgents, the nascent mujahideen, fighting the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. “On that day,” Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski recalled, “I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.” When his prediction came true later that year, Brzezinski gloated: “We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War.”
Stoking war for the purpose of revenge by proxy had dire costs. For the Soviet Union, the conflict became a “bleeding wound,” in the words of that country’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Over nine years, the USSR lost 14,500 soldiers. The people of Afghanistan endured far worse, suffering an estimated 1 million civilian deaths. The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 paved the way for a brutal civil war followed by the Taliban takeover of the country.
Mujahideen fighters of the Harakat-e Islami Party of Afghanistan stand beside the debris of an helicopter they shot down with a stinger missile in Maidan Province, Afghanistan, in late June 1987.Photo: AFP/Getty Images
The covert conflict by America and its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia also empowered Islamic extremists — including Osama bin Laden — and set the stage for the rise of his terror group, Al Qaeda. The Soviet Union quickly passed from existence, collapsing in 1991. Bin Laden soon turned his attention to American targets.
In 2001, 19 Al Qaeda operatives with box cutters used airliners to kill almost 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. They were able to goad the world’s sole superpower into eschewing a measured law enforcement response to the 9/11 attacks for a ruinous “global war on terror.” The forever wars, which began in Afghanistan, spread to Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, the African Sahel, Syria, Yemen, and beyond.
It took the United States until 2011 to finally kill bin Laden, but the conflict he ignited has raged on without him. The U.S. would suffer wheel-spinning stalemates across multiple war zones and another embarrassing defeat, this time in Afghanistan.
But just as with Vietnam, other people suffered far worse than Americans. More than 905,000 people have died due to direct violence in the forever wars, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. Around 3.8 million more have died indirectly from economic collapse, the destruction of medical and public health infrastructure, and other causes. As many as 60 million people have been displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines. All that death and suffering has been purchased by the U.S. government for a butcher’s bill of about $8 trillion and climbing.
A U.S. army soldier sets a mud hut on fire in a deserted village on the outskirts of Balad Ruz, Iraq, on Aug. 10, 2008.Photo: Marko Drobnjakovic/AP
President Donald Trump, despite his “peacemaker” rhetoric, has kept the forever wars burning with attacks in Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Trump has also been threatening war with Iran, a throwback to the first flush of the war on terror, when the popular quip among neoconservatives was: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” Such a conflict could result in tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths. If it spiraled into Israeli nuclear strikes on Iran, many millions could die.
The Trump administration has even found a way to add more casualties to the toll of the Vietnam War.
Trump’s 90-day freeze on foreign aid ground U.S.-funded programs in Southeast Asia, including demining initiatives, to a halt. In February, an unexploded U.S. bomb in Laos killed two teenaged girls. That same day, two toddlers in Cambodia were killed by another piece of unexploded ordnance.
Landmine victim Nguyen The Nghia displays his wounds from an unexploded munition blast he suffered when he was in the fifth grade in Quang Tri province, Vietnam on January 6, 2020. Photo: Nhac Nguyen/AFP/Getty Images
Aid has since resumed, but it remains unclear for how long and in what amounts. What isn’t in doubt is how much it is desperately needed. Millions of acres in Vietnam — almost one-fifth of the country — were still contaminated by U.S. munitions as of 2023. There might be as much as 800,000 tons of unexploded ordinance, or UXO, littering the nation. Experts say it could take a century or more to remediate Southeast Asia — and that was with full, uninterrupted U.S. assistance.
“In the long run, the abrupt withdrawal or decrease of U.S. support could permanently undermine UXO programs in the region if alternative funding and programs fail to fill the void. The landmines and UXO problem in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam are one of the most persistent and complex in the world, requiring consistent funding and a multifaceted approach over many decades,” Sera Koulabdara, the chief executive of Legacies of War, a U.S.-based advocacy and educational group focused on demining, told The Intercept. “Without this support, efforts to resolve the problem will be significantly hindered.”
More than 15 years ago, I traveled around Vietnam meeting survivors of the long, lethal tail of the American war and covering the work of a local demining team. I spoke with parents whose children had been maimed and killed by American munitions and youngsters orphaned by decaying American ordnance, including a girl named Pham Thi Hoa.
Pham’s family suffered immensely from the American war. One set of great-grandparents were killed, in 1969, when their hamlet was bombed. That same year, a great-aunt and three of her children died the same way. Sometime after the war ended in 1975, Pham’s other great-grandfather was killed by a landmine. A great-uncle died from an unexploded ordnance blast in 1996. And in 2007, Pham’s father, mother, and 3-year-old brother were all killed by a 105 mm U.S. artillery shell.
Pham made an indelible impression on me. I arrived in her village one afternoon expecting to interview a young woman of 18. When my car pulled up, an 8-year-old sprite of a girl with large brown eyes and a bright smile came bounding toward it. It tore my heart out. Somehow, I knew that I had been misinformed and that this was the survivor. I also knew there was no way I could ask this child what happened to her family. When she was out of earshot, her grandmother offered up a spare but gruesome account of bodies ripped in two and a toddler reduced to a basketful of viscera.
America’s conflicts keep killing people long after the guns fall silent.
I haven’t kept in touch with her, but Pham should be about 25 years old. There’s a good chance she’s married and may even have children of her own. They are going to grow up in a Vietnam contaminated by the deadly detritus of an American war that ended 50 years ago. Their children will too. Just how many generations of this family will live in such peril remains to be seen. The same can be said of people in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Laos, Syria, and beyond.
Kids in Vang Vieng, Laos playing with a disarmed American bomb dropped during the Vietnam War on September 1, 1989.Photo: Gerhard Joren/LightRocket/Getty Images
Wars aren’t over when they’re over. America’s conflicts keep killing people long after the guns fall silent. Just how many more people die may depend, in part, on the Trump administration’s decisions in the weeks and months ahead.
“No one knows how many years it would take to clear all the UXO in Southeast Asia. This will all depend on resources available. The most important thing we should prioritize is how many lives we can save from these explosive remnants of war,” said Koulabdara. “We have seen the number of accidents decline and this is a direct result of funding the clearance efforts and explosive ordnance risk education. These are vital programs that we must preserve until Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam are impact-free from the dangers of 50-year-old war trash.”
When Secretary Marco Rubio proposed a sweeping reorganization of the State Department on Tuesday, he singled out a human rights office that he said had become a platform for “left-wing activists” to pursue “arms embargoes” on Israel: the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.
Rubio is proposing to rename the bureau, downsize it, and shunt it under another section of the State Department. The bureau’s duties include writing an annual human rights report — which has been critical of Israel — and enforcing a law banning aid to military units that violate human rights that has rankled Israeli leaders.
On one level, the accusation that the bureau was a hotbed of anti-Israel activism baffled critics of the State Department’s handling of the Gaza war. Their push to block weapon sales to Israel went nowhere under Joe Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken.
Even some of the most skeptical voices on Israel on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, have never pushed for a full-on arms embargo. Instead, they have unsuccessfully attempted to block the sales of specific offensive weapons that have already caused widespread civilian casualties.
On another level, advocates say, Rubio’s statement offers a worrisome sign that the Trump administration is crippling one of the few forums where critics of Israel can even have their arguments heard — albeit routinely ignored by the department’s top ranks.
“This ‘anti-Israel’ stuff is so deeply incorrect,” said Charles Blaha, who served as director of the human rights bureau’s office of security and human rights from 2016 until his 2023 retirement. “The tendency in the Department is exactly the opposite. The Department is pro-Israel to the point of overlooking gross violations of human rights. The Department closes its eyes to it.”
Long Fight in Vain
Days after the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas and the start of Israel’s bombardment of Palestinian civilians, longtime State Department staffer Josh Paul left his post in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs in protest of continued arms shipments to Israel.
Paul called Hamas’s attack on Israel a “monstrosity” before adding that “the response Israel is taking, and with it the American support both for that response, and for the status quo of the occupation, will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people.”
His high-profile departure presaged months of internal disputes within the State Department over whether to keep supplying Israel with offensive weapons, including 2,000-pound bombs that caused devastation in Gaza’s densely populated urban areas.
Critics of Israel have almost always been on the losing side, even when the Biden administration was publicly voicing sympathy for Palestinian civilians.
Only once, as the Biden administration faced criticism from the Democratic Party’s left wing in the run-up to the 2024 election, did the administration halt a singlearms sale of 2,000-pound bombs. The decision had little operational effect, but Republican critics nonetheless claimed that it amounted to a “partial arms embargo.”
Inside the State Department, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor was seen as one of the few bureaucratic factions pushing Blinken and Biden to take a tougher approach to Israel.
The human rights bureau, Paul said in a Wednesday interview, “certainly had a role in arguing for that suspension” of 2,000-pound bomb transfers. But there was nothing inappropriate about that given the way Israel shrugged off Biden administration calls for restraint, he said.
“These are tools of foreign policy, so it is absolutely appropriate, when a partner is acting in a way that is contrary to U.S. interests, that is contrary to U.S. and international law, that arms transfers should be suspended as a point of leverage,” he said.
The State Department said this week that the bureau will be renamed the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Religious Freedom — dropping the emphasis on “labor” — and moved under a new coordinator for foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs, merging it with another bureau.
Paul said that on its own, slotting the bureau under the coordinator would not necessarily forecast a weakening of influence, but the move had to be placed in a broader context.
“I think it’s really going to depend a lot on who is in that role, and of course the broader intent of the secretary and the State Department,” he said.
Rubio, in a Substack post on Tuesday, explained why he was pursuing the reorganization.
“The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor became a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Brazil, and to transform their hatred of Israel into concrete policies such as arms embargoes,” he said.
Blaha, the former bureau director, rejected that characterization. He said the bureau’s role in the State Department as a sounding board for human rights advocates had to be weighed against the power of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs — the State Department’s Middle East office — which both argued in favor of unqualified support for Israel.
“The human rights bureau is the place that activists most frequently interact with, with regards to Israel. The Israel desk doesn’t really want to have anything to do with that, in my experience” he said. “How is the State Department going to interact with civil society?”
Drawing on sources such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the bureau was responsible for writing annual reports that have been critical of Israel. The last report produced under the Biden administration stated that there were “credible reports” that Israel had committed “arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings,” “enforced disappearance” and “torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment by government officials.”
The State Department is planning to scale down those congressionally mandated human rights reports, NPR reported last week.
The Future of Vetting?
Blaha’s former office was at the center of an even more pointed debate under the Biden administration about whether to block aid to specific Israeli military units accused of crimes — as opposed to the larger question of arm sales to Israel as a whole.
The future of that office under Rubio’s proposed reorganization of the State Department is unclear. Its name does not appear on a high-level chart about the new proposed structure. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.)
Under legislation named after former Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who championed it in the late 1990s, the State Department and Defense Department are forbidden from providing aid to foreign security units that have been credibly accused of “gross” human rights violations.
The office of security and human rights was responsible for vetting specific units for U.S. aid.
To its namesake’s chagrin, Leahy law has never been applied to Israel. Months into the war on Gaza, however, a special Israel-vetting forum recommended cutting off aid to several Israeli military and police units — a recommendation Blinken ultimately ignored.
Reports indicating that Blinken might sanction one unit led to an outcry last year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Rubio, then serving as a senator, said that it would “stigmatize the entire IDF and encourage Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.” Blinken never followed through.
In December, Palestinian families supported by the nonprofit organization Democracy for the Arab World Now sued the State Department, seeking to force it to uphold the Leahy law as it relates to Israel.
“The department’s own reports say that Israeli units are committing gross violations of human rights, but the department has never found a single Israeli unit ineligible, and that is what the law requires,” said Blaha, who is advising the group.
Even if Rubio succeeds in renaming and downsizing the human rights bureau, advocates said, the State Department will still be responsible for upholding the vetting law.
“The Leahy law is the law. The administration is required to enforce it,” said Tim Rieser, a foreign policy adviser to Leahy who helped draft the legislation. “The State Department is the only logical agency to enforce the Leahy Law.”
Rieser said the law should not be applied only to Israeli security units: It also likely applies to the administration’s payments to El Salvador to hold immigrants illegally deported to the notorious CECOT prison.
“It should,” Rieser said, “because subjecting prisoners to cruel, inhumane, and shockingly degrading treatment; denying them access to their families, lawyers, and any meaningful due process; with no idea if they will ever be released is a gross violation of human rights.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has declared war on whistleblowers inside the Pentagon — at the same time that new reports of his own lax operational security and repeated disclosures of highly classified information to people without security clearances keep emerging.
Current and former Defense Department officials and the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee called out Hegseth, in conversations with The Intercept, for hypocrisy and a lack of accountability.
A defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, confirmed recent reporting by The Associated Press that Hegseth had a “dirty” internet connection in his office to use the Signal messaging app on a personal computer and bypass the Defense Department’s security protocols.
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell issued a non-denial denial to The Intercept, referencing only Hegseth’s Defense Department computer. “The Secretary of Defense’s use of communications systems and channels is classified,” said Parnell. “However, we can confirm that the Secretary has never used and does not currently use Signal on his government computer.”
The defense official said that Hegseth used multiple computers and phones even though personal electronic devices are generally banned, due to security vulnerabilities, from use inside the defense secretary’s office.
Another official said that the double standard at the Pentagon, where rank-and-file employees are suspected of leaks without cause while the chief shares classified attack plans with unauthorized civilians, had bred anger and discontent among staff. “I don’t mind telling you this now,” one official said. “I can’t say I really care too much anymore.”
Hegseth used Signal to share details about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a group chat — named “Defense | Team Huddle” — that included more than a dozen personal and professional contacts including his wife Jennifer, a former Fox News producer who does not work at the Pentagon. Also in the group were Hegseth’s brother Phil and Tim Parlatore, who serves as his personal lawyer; both have jobs with the Department of Defense. The Signal group also included many of Hegseth’s then-top aides, including Joe Kasper, his chief of staff; Dan Caldwell; and Darin Selnick.
The chat reportedly revealed information also disclosed in a separate Signal chat that same day, which mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. Unlike the latter chat, the “Team Huddle” group was created by Hegseth, who shared classified information with people who had no reason to know sensitive attack plans.
“Accountability starts at the top. Secretary Hegseth has refused to take responsibility for his own mishandling of classified information, but has readily punished others for far less,” Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., an Army veteran and ranking member of the Armed Services Committee told The Intercept. “Hypocrisy and finger-pointing is no way to lead the U.S. military.”
“Hypocrisy and finger-pointing is no way to lead the U.S. military.”
Five current and former defense officials who spoke with The Intercept castigated Hegseth for the unauthorized disclosures. Four also drew specific attention to the defense secretary’s repeated efforts to root out other Pentagon officials who supposedly leak information.
Kasper, Hegseth’s former chief of staff, called out “unauthorized disclosures of national security information involving sensitive communications with principals within the Office of the Secretary of Defense” and threatened that parties found responsible would be “referred to the appropriate criminal law enforcement entity for criminal prosecution,” in a March memo.
“This is exactly what Hegseth did multiple times,” said one of the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Kasper also threatened to use polygraph tests as part of the investigation of leaks. Less than a month later, news broke that Kasper was leaving his post, amid in-fighting and recriminations about unauthorized disclosures among Hegseth’s aides.
“Hegseth is even more unfit for the role of SecDef than we anticipated. In just a few weeks he has personally committed serious security breaches, denied this, and then refused accountability, and he has set the Pentagon and by extension the entire DoD into chaos,” said Wes Bryant, who until recently served as the chief of civilian harm assessments and senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. “It was very clear to me that he would do exactly as he is doing: refusing to hold himself accountable to the very standards, conduct, and regulations that he is charged with holding the force to. But that is the Trump administration and current GOP norm now — they are above the law, and anything goes.”
Hegseth blamed “disgruntled former employees” for revealing the second Signal chat group. Reports suggest this is a reference to four senior advisers who recently left the Defense Department. Three of them — Colin Carroll, Caldwell, and Selnick — were escorted out of the Pentagon and reportedly accused of leaking information to the press. They put out a joint statement on X questioning “if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with.”
The fourth adviser, former Defense Department spokesperson John Ullyot, resigned earlier this month and then published an opinion piece detailing the depths of dysfunction at the Pentagon, including the peddling of lies by “Hegseth’s team.”
“Defense Department officials working for Hegseth tried to smear the aides anonymously to reporters, claiming they were fired for leaking sensitive information as part of an investigation ordered earlier this month,” Ullyot wrote. “Yet none of this is true. While the department said that it would conduct polygraph tests as part of the probe, not one of the three has been given a lie detector test. In fact, at least one of them has told former colleagues that investigators advised him he was about to be cleared officially of any wrongdoing.”
A former defense official, who was not authorized to talk to the press by his current employer, referred to the episode as a “full on shit show.”
Hegseth’s recent purge followed the February firings of top military officers, including former Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Charles Q. Brown and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti.
The Defense Department refused to provide information about the number of “unauthorized disclosures” of national security information since January 20 and how many instances have been referred to law enforcement for “criminal prosecution” as threatened in Kasper’s March memo.
It remains unclear whether Hegseth will be held to account for his actions. Hegseth is currently under investigation for his use of Signal in sharing classified information with Goldberg and others. That inquiry is being conducted by Acting Inspector General Steven Stebbins because President Donald Trump fired Robert Storch from his Senate-confirmed Pentagon inspector general role as part of his firings of 17 inspectors general across the government in January.
Reed, the Rhode Island senator, has called for the inspector general to expand its investigation to include the “Defense | Team Huddle” chat. “He must immediately explain why he reportedly texted classified information that could endanger American servicemembers’ lives on a commercial app that included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer,” said Reed.
Hegseth’s personal phone number, which he used for his Signal chats, was recently available on WhatsApp and Facebook as well as Sleeper.com, a fantasy football and sports betting site, where he used the username “PeteHegseth.” Experts say that this puts his Signal account at high risk for targeting by hackers and foreign adversaries.
In response to a specific question by The Intercept about whether Hegseth’s disclosures of national security information have been referred to law enforcement for “criminal prosecution,” a Pentagon spokesperson demurred.
“We won’t be able to provide anything on this topic at the moment,” the unnamed spokesperson replied by email.
The Pentagon quietly scrubbed an advisory board’s website after a fired aide to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth complained that it was stocked with holdovers hostile to President Donald Trump who might be spreading damaging leaks.
The Defense Policy Board’s online roster was erased after axed staffer Dan Caldwell told Tucker Carlson in an interview that its members were “incredibly hostile” to Trump.
Caldwell was fired Friday amid a Defense Department leak investigation that has led to the ouster of several longtime Hegseth confidants.
In his interview with Carlson, Caldwell cast himself as the victim of a behind-the-scenes battle between warmongers pushing for conflict with Iran and skeptics of foreign military intervention such as himself.
Although the Defense Policy Board is an independent advisory group with no powers of its own, he blamed members including Susan Rice, a former Joe Biden aide, as potential sources of leaks for which he had been blamed.
“She and a bunch of other people who are incredibly hostile to the president and his worldview remain on the Defense Policy Board,” Caldwell said. “I would just say, if you want to look where leaks are maybe coming from, that would be a place to start.”
By Thursday of this week, the names of Rice and other policy board members had vanished from the Pentagon website. The change happened after Caldwell’s interview was posted to X on Monday, according to Internet Archive captures of the website.
Biden’s secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, removed all the members of the policy board and 41 other boards just weeks into his tenure.
He eventually replaced Trump’s lame-duck appointees with establishment D.C. figures associated with former Democratic and Republican presidents, drawing heavily on Washington’s deep bench of liberal and neoconservative hawks. At the time the site went down, the board included figures like Rice and former ambassador Eric Edelman, who served as a Defense Department under secretary during George W. Bush’s presidency.
They and other board members could not immediately be reached for comment.
Board minutes posted online indicate that it has not met since last June.
It’s unclear why Hegseth, who has rapidly moved to remove officials affiliated with Biden from the Defense Department leadership, would have allowed Rice to receive sensitive information.
Caldwell argued that board membership would have given members such as Rice a pathway because it gave her a “credential and affiliation” with the Pentagon.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing criticism and calls for his firing after it was reported by the New York Times (NYT) that he shared sensitive military plans of a March attack on Yemen in a Signal chat group that included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.
According to a source familiar with the matter, speaking with Reuters, the chat included about a dozen people and contained details of the airstrikes’ schedule.
“The revelations of a second Signal chat raise more questions about Hegseth’s use of an unclassified messaging system to share highly sensitive security details,” Reuters wrote.
The Pentagon had been slowly dedicating more resources to killing fewer civilians in recent years, following a long drumbeat of damning investigations of civilian casualties by the press, nongovernmental organizations, government-supported think tanks, and even the U.S. military itself.
But now, under the control of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense is reversing course.
The Intercept spoke with five current and former Defense Department officials familiar with its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, or CHMR, efforts, who say that the Pentagon is in the process of eliminating or downsizing offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties during U.S. combat operations.
On the chopping block are the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office, which handles policies that reduce dangers to noncombatants, and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which is focused on training and tools for preventing civilian casualties.
The Army also recently announced it will make law of war training — which covers basic battlefield ethics, prohibited acts, and rules of engagement — optional, in an effort to remove “unnecessary distractions” and increase focus on “decisive action in combat.”
This comes as Hegseth trumpets an overwhelming emphasis on “lethality” and cuts to programs that run afoul of Trump administration priorities. Hegseth also reportedly plans to overhaul the entire JAG Corps, which is essential to ensuring adherence to the rule of law and upholding the Uniform Code of Military Justice, after firing the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Trump has also rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes and Special Operations raids outside conventional battlefields, broadening the range of people who can be targeted. After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks and reports of civilian casualties in war zones like Somalia and Yemen spiked.
“There is an overt and ongoing effort to completely shut the Center down and to remove CHMR across all the commands,” said Wes Bryant, who until recently served as the chief of civilian harm assessments and senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. “Basically, they are wiping DoD of anything related to Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response.”
The four other officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution or to preserve their ability to lobby behind the scenes, expressed varying levels of concern over how the demise of CHMR would affect combat operations and what Hegseth’s priorities might mean for the world. One of them mused that “lethality” might prove to be only meaningless jargon, but worried that it could indicate something far worse: eschewing military professionalism in favor of “wanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law.”
CHMR-oriented personnel at combatant commands around the world will be shuffled into new roles, according to some of the officials. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees military operations across the Middle East, pushed back on this when contacted by The Intercept, stating that the “CHMR team at CENTCOM will continue to provide civilian harm mitigation and assessment support to the command for the foreseeable future.”
Several officials were hopeful that a concerted effort by advocates to preserve some CHMR work at the Pentagon and at combatant commands would allow harm mitigation efforts to endure within different structures and under different names. But even one of those former officials said that the CHMR enterprise was likely to end up “stillborn,” unable to even complete the phased implementation first laid out in the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan — written at the direction of then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin — that was released in 2022.
One official emphasized that CHMR’s core principles provide more benefits to the military than an overriding focus on lethality. “Shrinking or perverting it beyond recognition or getting rid of it altogether does a disservice to the men and women of the DoD and the institution itself, not to mention the American public,” that official said.
The Pentagon refuses to say whether Hegseth will rescind the CHMR instruction, which established the Pentagon’s policies, responsibilities, and procedures for mitigating and responding to noncombatant casualties. “We have no new announcements to make regarding office closures or changes to policy at this time,” an unnamed Pentagon spokesperson replied, by email, to repeated detailed questions.
“Dismantling these efforts would undermine years of work to learn from past mistakes and improve how the U.S. prevents and responds to civilian harm from its operations — work that actually began under the first Trump administration,” said Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “Congress mandated many of these efforts through bipartisan legislation, and it must ensure that the programs it authorized and funded are not abandoned.”
Hegseth has made it clear that enhancing his department’s capacity to kill people is his number one priority. “Your job [as secretary] is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening,” he said during his confirmation process. Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Hegseth has doubled down. “We will revive the warrior ethos,” he announced. “We will remain the strongest and most lethal force in the world.”
As a Fox News personality, Hegseth — a former Army National Guard officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq — cast troops charged with war crimes as “heroes.” During Trump’s first term in office, Hegseth lobbied for pardons of Army Lt. Clint Lorance and Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, and championed Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, each of whom was charged or convicted of war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump granted pardons to Lorance and Golsteyn, and reversed a demotion of Gallagher, tagging Hegseth in a tweet announcing the review of one of the cases.
Hegseth takes a dim view of the Geneva Conventions, which form the foundation of the law of armed conflict, or LOAC, and remain the most important rules limiting the barbarity of war by protecting civilians, wounded combatants, and prisoners of war, among others. In his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth asked, “Should we follow the Geneva conventions? … Aren’t we just better off in winning our wars according to our own rules?”
At his Senate confirmation hearing, Hegseth said that during his time in the military, “restrictive rules of engagement” briefed to him by a military lawyer, known as a JAG, made war-fighting more difficult. But rules of engagement, which provide instructions for the use of deadly force in military operations, are issued by a senior commander — not a JAG officer.
Bryant — who worked as a Special Operations joint terminal attack controller, or JTAC, and called in thousands of strikes against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups across the greater Middle East before serving as chief of civilian harm assessment — said that Hegseth has little grasp of the laws of war.
“In Hegseth, you have a Secretary of Defense who really does not understand LOAC. Every time I’ve heard him talking about his time in Afghanistan and the law of armed conflict, he’s talking about things that were not actually LOAC but policy,” said Bryant. “So, Hegseth blames all his experiences of being overly restricted in combat on military lawyers and LOAC — when the types of operational restrictions he has cited have nothing to do with lawyers, the law of armed conflict, or international law.”
the Signal Chat among senior Trump administration officials (and a journalist) discussing military strikes in Yemen revealed that the attack targeted a civilian residence in an effort to kill a Houthi target. It is one of more than 200 strikes conducted in Yemen by the Trump administration since the beginning of March, carried out in an attempt to force Houthi fighters to halt attacks on ships in the Red Sea, which the Houthis say is in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. Local Yemeni authorities say more than 50 civilians have been killed in the attacks.
(Hegseth is currently under investigation for his use of Signal, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app. That inquiry is being conducted by Acting Inspector General Steven Stebbins because Trump fired Robert Storch from his Senate-confirmed Pentagon inspector general role as part of his firings of 17 inspectors general across the government in January.)
Fifteen civilians were reportedly killed and at least 20 injured in strikes on March 15 and 16, alone, according to Airwars, the U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. “In just two days of strikes under the new Trump administration, U.S. forces reportedly killed half the number of civilians killed in a full year of strikes under Biden,” the group reported.
These strikes were conducted with CENTCOM’s civilian harm mitigation and response officers still on the job. “The CHMR team at U.S. CENTCOM continues to be focused on their assigned tasks. There has been no change to their status or work focus,” a nameless “defense official” told The Intercept by email. “We do not anticipate the DoD CHMR effort at CENTCOM being shutdown at this point.”
Trump also recently posted a black-and-white video showing more than 70 people gathered in a circle. An explosion occurs during the 25-second video, leaving a massive crater. “These Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack,” Trump claimed, without offering a location or any other details about the strike. “Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis!”
A former U.S. drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in the CENTCOM and Africa Command regions during the first Trump administration was skeptical of the vetting process that identified the targets in Trump’s video. “My suspicion is that it is very low. NAI — names, area of interest — and gatherings would be all that is required. This is not proper vetting, if this is what they are doing,” he told The Intercept on the condition of anonymity due to his nondisclosure agreements with the government. “Remember in his first term the whole of AFRICOM was shut down due to negligent strikes. They had multiple ‘missed’ strikes that killed civilians.”
After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks in Somalia tripled and U.S. military and independent counts of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones — including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen — increased. Since taking office a second time, Trump again rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes and Special Operations raids outside conventional war zones.
During his first overseas trip as defense secretary, Hegseth met with senior AFRICOM leaders and signed a directive easing policy constraints and executive oversight on airstrikes. “The president and the secretary of defense have given me expanded authorities,” Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of AFRICOM recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We’re hitting them hard. I now have the capability to hit them harder.”
A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that one April 2018 attack on al-Shabaab militants in Somalia — conducted under Trump’s loosened rules — killed three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time, AFRICOM announced it had killed “five terrorists”and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.”
The Pentagon’s inquiry into the attack that killed Luul and Mariam found that the Americans who conducted the strike were confused and inexperienced and that they argued about basic details, like how many passengers were in the targeted vehicle. The U.S. strike cell members mistook a woman and a child for an adult male, killing Luul and Mariam in a follow-up attack as they ran from the truck in which they had hitched a ride to visit relatives. Despite this, the investigation — by the unit that conducted the strike — concluded that standard operating procedures and the rules of engagement were followed. No one was ever held accountable for the deaths. For more than six years, Luul and Mariam’s family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by AFRICOM, but did not receive a response.
When asked how the demise of CHMR would affect AFRICOM operations, spokesperson Kelly Cahalan punted. “CHMR is an OSD policy,” she told The Intercept, referring to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “We aren’t going to speculate about potential policy changes.”
Multiple sources, speaking on background, said that CENTCOM chief Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla had specifically advocated for civilian harm mitigation efforts, which the Washington Post previously reported, purportedly telling others that his CHMR officers were an integral part of the command’s operations. CENTCOM refused to offer comment. “We have nothing to provide you on this,” a “defense official” wrote in an email.
Some experts worry that the pending demise of CHMR, the firings of the judge advocates general, and loosened rules of engagement for drone strikes and commando raids is part of a broader push to shunt aside ethics and accountability across the military.
“The U.S. is setting up its own warfighters to fail.”
“We’re seeing a dramatic reversal of progress across the armed forces, which will ultimately undermine the United States’ strategic goals. Military success isn’t measured by the number of people the armed forces kill; it’s measured by winning carefully-planned battles designed to achieve a strategic military goal without causing needless destruction,” Daphne Eviatar, the director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, told The Intercept. “By emphasizing lethality and eliminating training on the laws of war, loosening rules of engagement and firing anyone with power to exercise oversight over U.S. armed forces, the U.S. is setting up its own warfighters to fail.”
Bryant voiced similar concerns about where the potential demise of CHMR efforts would ultimately lead. “I do worry about the direction that Hegseth and the Trump administration are going after this first step of dissolving the CHMR enterprise. Is this administration now going to try to change the warfighting culture and doctrinal standards of the U.S. military, and have us executing our next conflict more like Israel has carried out in Gaza?” he asked. “If we do get into a large-scale conflict — whether in Europe or China or elsewhere — will we not care one way or another about the civilian populace? Will our current low tolerance for civilian casualties and historically conservative application of ‘proportionality’ under international law be completely reversed?”
The Pentagon is considering scrapping key regulations intended to address sexual assault within the military, according to a memorandum obtained by The Intercept. Advocates for sexual violence prevention and awareness in the armed forces argue that removing these rules would not only potentially violate federal law, it would also have a “chilling effect” on survivors.
On February 19, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies, in coordination with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to review and potentially cancel regulations that the administration might deem unconstitutional, that inhibit innovation, or are too onerous to small businesses, among other grab-bag categories.
In response to Trump’s order “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Deregulatory Initiative,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg called on top officials at more than a dozen Defense Department agencies. Feinberg ordered them to comb through their organizations’ regulations — identified in a spreadsheet attached to the memo — and specify whether any rules flagged in the executive order apply to them and indicate whether they should be altered or rescinded.
One of the regulations under review created the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program and the Sexual Assault Prevention and Reporting Office, which oversees the SAPR program. SAPR provides military survivors of sexual assault with mental and physical heath care services, advocacy services, and legal assistance. In addition to offering support to victims, the program also provides trainings on how to prevent sexual assault and collects data on sexual violence within the military.
The program and the office implementing it emerged from a 2005 Department of Defense initiative looking into sexual violence in the military. Later that year they were effectively codified by the National Defense Authorization Act, which required the military to create a victims services program. The program was expanded by the 2006 NDAA, with more oversight provided to Congress. Ever since, the Pentagon has been required to provide a comprehensive report on sexual violence and the efforts it is taking to prevent it to Congress.
Experts in military sexual violence argue that while the program is far from perfect, losing it would set justice for survivors back decades. They also raised legal concerns over any efforts to potentially shutter the program, noting that it’s mandated by Congress.
“Framing this like another pointless initiative is dangerous,” said Erin Kirk-Cuomo, co-founder of Not In My Marine Corps, a group of current and former service members working to end sexual violence in the military. “It’s a misunderstanding of number one, the law, and also the lived reality of what it is to be a sexual assault and harassment survivor in a military uniform.”
Kirk-Cuomo said that without SAPR, armed forces culture would revert to the days of the “Tailhook” scandal: an infamous incident of mass sexual violence in the military that sparked national outrage and action. She fears a return to a time when “sexual assault survivors are ignored, inappropriately discharged to silence them, and at worst, pushed into self-harm.”
Even with these regulations in place, sexual violence remains underreported in the military, especially among male service members, said Kirk-Cuomo. The military estimates that in 2023, roughly 29,000 military personnel were sexually assaulted. But research from Brown University suggests that the real number is likely 2.5 times higher than estimated.
A 2021 investigation by The Intercept found that sexual assault of U.S. military personnel in Africa was far more common and widespread than the Pentagon reported to Congress.
Between 2010 and 2020, the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office counted 73 cases of sexual assault in the U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, area of operations. Yet criminal investigation files, obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, show that military criminal investigators logged at least 158 allegations of sexual offenses in Africa during that same period. The case files also revealed that charges of sexual misconduct involving U.S. military personnel occurred in at least 22 countries in Africa, including 13 nations that did not appear in annual Defense Department reports.
“He’s exactly the type of service member who consistently marginalizes the voice of survivors.”
This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has hinted at dismantling SAPR. Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and military leadership rolled out cuts to several SAPR programs, which they later walked back.
Kirk-Cuomo said it isn’t shocking that Hegseth in particular, would have it out for SAPR. “He’s exactly the type of service member who consistently marginalizes the voice of survivors,” she said. Hegseth faced allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman in 2017. He denied it, saying it was consensual. No charges were filed. He has acknowledged paying a settlement to his accuser.
The spreadsheet of regulations under review was developed by the Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Privacy, Civil Liberties, and Transparency, according to Pentagon spokesperson Eric Pahon. Among those tasked with conducting reviews of their regulations include the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, which oversees the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office; the Office of the Inspector General, the Defense Department’s watchdog; and the departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Feinberg directed officials to complete their review and submit their recommendations by close of business April 18, so it’s too early to tell which regulations might ultimately wind up on the chopping block.
The regulations under review run the gamut, from providing protections to vulnerable individuals and groups to rules necessary to shield national security and safeguard taxpayers from fraud and abuse. These include regulations governing the protection of human subjects in biomedical research, assistance to victims and witnesses of crimes, and defense contracting. The memo comes as Pentagon leadership makes life more difficult for marginalized communities serving in the U.S. military, going so far as to temporarily erase the achievements of nonwhite service members, including Jackie Robinson, from their website.
The Pentagon would not clarify when final determinations on rules to be modified or terminated would take place. “All reviews and decisions on those regulations will be made in accordance with EO 14219,” Pahon told The Intercept, referring to Trump’s February 19 executive order.
Josh Connolly, senior vice president of Protect Our Defenders, said it seems as if the Trump administration is conflating “wokeness” with sexual violence prevention, an issue that impacts service members of all genders. “Just taking him at his word, he doesn’t want women to serve in combat roles. Sounds like [Hegseth] thinks they’ve gotten unfair treatment to their benefit and to the detriment of men in the military,” he said. “And so through that lens, I’m concerned.”
Connolly pointed out that a key part of the regulation requires the military to track incidents of sexual violence, a vital part of taking this issue seriously. “They would truly be sweeping this issue under the rug,” he said, “and it would send a profoundly chilling message to survivors of sexual assault, harassment without question.”
Ultimately, the responsibility to protect this program lies with Congress, said Connolly.
“Congress must play a role in this, because they help set up and stand up this office to begin with,” he said. “This is happening on their watch.”
On March 17, 2025, DefenseScoop reported that Congress approved $141 billion for Pentagon research and development — an amount larger than the budgets of most federal agencies, and close to the size of the seven next largest military budgets around the world. Yet, as usual, there was little debate. Instead, military leaders and lawmakers lamented that the figure was $7 billion less than last year…
As protests against Elon Musk proliferated at Tesla dealerships, law enforcement analysts quietly warned of a threat from “violent opportunists” — and from the cars themselves.
In California, intelligence analysts said opportunists might exploit peaceful gatherings “to mask criminal intentions, including vandalism, arson, or other disruptive acts.” In Nevada, analysts said that electric cars lit on fire posed a risk of toxic gases and self-sustaining “thermal runaway.”
Documents released Thursday by a transparency nonprofit show that law enforcement officials have trained a microscope on demonstrations against Musk in the past month.
Ryan Shapiro, co-founder of the group Property of the People, said the intelligence reports show law enforcement twisting itself into pretzels to avoid the obvious.
“Law enforcement has a messaging problem. They want to portray anti-Musk sentiment as terroristic, but they simultaneously know just how popular and mainstream anti-Musk sentiment actually is,” he said in an email.
All the documents include a nod toward free speech and free assembly rights, sometimes in the form of a “First Amendment Acknowledgement.” Shapiro dismissed that as nothing more than boilerplate.
“Generic First Amendment language is a common pretense in intelligence documents about surveilling dissent,” he said. “It’s akin to writing, ‘Nothing in this surveillance report about you should be understood as spying on you.’”
Two of the reports obtained by his group were produced by state fusion or intelligence centers, which were created after the September, 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Those fusion centers were supposed to provide local law enforcement a way to receive updates from the feds on terrorist threats and report back suspicious activity. Activists said they quickly turned into hubs of surveillance on nonviolent domestic protest.
Shapiro, who has collected similar bulletins for years, says they often inform the thinking of front-line police chiefs and officers.
Days before FBI Director Kash Patel equated vandalism of Teslas with “domestic terrorism,” an intelligence center in California warned law enforcement about “violent opportunists.”
The Northern California Regional Intelligence Center noted that swastikas had been painted onto Tesla charging stations in San Ramon. Someone vandalized parked Tesla vehicles in the East Bay with the word “Nazi.” And someone else threw paint during a protest.
The March 21 report pointed to scattered examples of arsons and shootings at Tesla dealerships across the country, none involving bodily injury.
“Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s visible support for Donald Trump and his involvement in the administration as Head of DOGE has likely made Tesla facilities and vehicles symbolically larger targets,” the report states.
It continues, “Most activities organized to speak against Tesla have been peaceful and protected under the First Amendment. However, violent opportunists may exploit these gatherings to mask criminal intentions, including vandalism, arson, or other disruptive acts.”
Separately, the Southern Nevada Counter Terrorism Center and Nevada Threat Analysis Center issued their own joint bulletin warning about the fire threat from electric vehicles on March 13.
While an Army veteran shot himself inside a Tesla Cybertruck that exploded in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day, the bulletin does not mention that highly publicized incident.
Rather, it focuses on the “emerging trend of threat actors encouraging acts of violence against electric vehicles, manufacturers, and associated charging infrastructure in the United States,” without mentioning Musk by name, including the threat of exploding Teslas.
Separately, the FBI partnered with the Department of Homeland Security on a March 21 intelligence bulletin.
The document stated that there had been incidents involving “arson, gunfire, and vandalism, including graffiti expressing grievances against those the perpetrators perceive to be racists, fascists, or political opponents.”
The FBI-DHS report warned of lumping “constitutionally protected activity” in with “preoperational planning associated with violence.”
All the anti-Tesla crimes appeared to have been committed by “lone offenders,” the report stated — a conclusion at odds with Trump’s claim that billionaire George Soros might have been behind “coordinated” attacks on Tesla.
The careful language in the intelligence bulletins about free speech has not been echoed by top officials in the Trump administration, who have issued fearmongering statements that do not draw a distinction between protest and violence, echoing the president himself.
When Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, explicitly called for “nonviolent” actions at a March 19 “Tesla Takedown” protest, Attorney General Pam Bondi responded with a warning for her to “tread very carefully.”
Four days before a planned nationwide protest at Tesla dealerships, meanwhile, Patel announced that he was forming a special FBI task force.
“The FBI has been investigating the increase in violent activity toward Tesla, and over the last few days, we have taken additional steps to crack down and coordinate our response,” Patel said. “This is domestic terrorism. Those responsible will be pursued, caught, and brought to justice.”
As protests against Elon Musk proliferated at Tesla dealerships, law enforcement analysts quietly warned of a threat from “violent opportunists” — and from the cars themselves.
In California, intelligence analysts said opportunists might exploit peaceful gatherings “to mask criminal intentions, including vandalism, arson, or other disruptive acts.” In Nevada, analysts said that electric cars lit on fire posed a risk of toxic gases and self-sustaining “thermal runaway.”
Documents released Thursday by a transparency nonprofit show that law enforcement officials have trained a microscope on demonstrations against Musk in the past month.
Ryan Shapiro, co-founder of the group Property of the People, said the intelligence reports show law enforcement twisting itself into pretzels to avoid the obvious.
“Law enforcement has a messaging problem. They want to portray anti-Musk sentiment as terroristic, but they simultaneously know just how popular and mainstream anti-Musk sentiment actually is,” he said in an email.
All the documents include a nod toward free speech and free assembly rights, sometimes in the form of a “First Amendment Acknowledgement.” Shapiro dismissed that as nothing more than boilerplate.
“Generic First Amendment language is a common pretense in intelligence documents about surveilling dissent,” he said. “It’s akin to writing, ‘Nothing in this surveillance report about you should be understood as spying on you.’”
Two of the reports obtained by his group were produced by state fusion or intelligence centers, which were created after the September, 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Those fusion centers were supposed to provide local law enforcement a way to receive updates from the feds on terrorist threats and report back suspicious activity. Activists said they quickly turned into hubs of surveillance on nonviolent domestic protest.
Shapiro, who has collected similar bulletins for years, says they often inform the thinking of front-line police chiefs and officers.
Days before FBI Director Kash Patel equated vandalism of Teslas with “domestic terrorism,” an intelligence center in California warned law enforcement about “violent opportunists.”
The Northern California Regional Intelligence Center noted that swastikas had been painted onto Tesla charging stations in San Ramon. Someone vandalized parked Tesla vehicles in the East Bay with the word “Nazi.” And someone else threw paint during a protest.
The March 21 report pointed to scattered examples of arsons and shootings at Tesla dealerships across the country, none involving bodily injury.
“Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s visible support for Donald Trump and his involvement in the administration as Head of DOGE has likely made Tesla facilities and vehicles symbolically larger targets,” the report states.
It continues, “Most activities organized to speak against Tesla have been peaceful and protected under the First Amendment. However, violent opportunists may exploit these gatherings to mask criminal intentions, including vandalism, arson, or other disruptive acts.”
Separately, the Southern Nevada Counter Terrorism Center and Nevada Threat Analysis Center issued their own joint bulletin warning about the fire threat from electric vehicles on March 13.
While an Army veteran shot himself inside a Tesla Cybertruck that exploded in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day, the bulletin does not mention that highly publicized incident.
Rather, it focuses on the “emerging trend of threat actors encouraging acts of violence against electric vehicles, manufacturers, and associated charging infrastructure in the United States,” without mentioning Musk by name, including the threat of exploding Teslas.
Separately, the FBI partnered with the Department of Homeland Security on a March 21 intelligence bulletin.
The document stated that there had been incidents involving “arson, gunfire, and vandalism, including graffiti expressing grievances against those the perpetrators perceive to be racists, fascists, or political opponents.”
The FBI-DHS report warned of lumping “constitutionally protected activity” in with “preoperational planning associated with violence.”
All the anti-Tesla crimes appeared to have been committed by “lone offenders,” the report stated — a conclusion at odds with Trump’s claim that billionaire George Soros might have been behind “coordinated” attacks on Tesla.
The careful language in the intelligence bulletins about free speech has not been echoed by top officials in the Trump administration, who have issued fearmongering statements that do not draw a distinction between protest and violence, echoing the president himself.
When Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, explicitly called for “nonviolent” actions at a March 19 “Tesla Takedown” protest, Attorney General Pam Bondi responded with a warning for her to “tread very carefully.”
Four days before a planned nationwide protest at Tesla dealerships, meanwhile, Patel announced that he was forming a special FBI task force.
“The FBI has been investigating the increase in violent activity toward Tesla, and over the last few days, we have taken additional steps to crack down and coordinate our response,” Patel said. “This is domestic terrorism. Those responsible will be pursued, caught, and brought to justice.”
If the secretary of state can simply declare a legal permanent resident deportable based on their constitutionally protected activities, the First Amendment no longer applies to noncitizens.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he has a singular mission. “Your job [as secretary] is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening,” he said during his confirmation process. Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Hegseth has doubled down. “We do warfighting here at the Department of Defense,” he said at a Pentagon town hall, demanding a “laser focus on readiness, lethality, and warfighting.”
Not everyone at the Defense Department seems to have gotten the message. Right now, the U.S. military is looking to pour money into the renovation of 35 golf course sand traps at the Woodlawn Golf Course at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Contracting documents show that Air Force Special Operations Command also wants to purchase sterile mushroom compost for the golf course greens at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. It is also looking into hydroseeding at that same course. The Army, for its part, plans to issue a service contract that will cover maintenance in the golf course clubhouse at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.
What golf has to do with lethality is a question that the Defense Department failed to answer. Nor would the Pentagon weigh in on the hundreds of millions of dollars wrapped up in, or swallowed up by, military golf courses over decades. The Pentagon did not provide a full tally of its current inventory of golf courses, which The Intercept put at around 145. What is clear is that critics have been raising alarms about the military’s golf obsession for at least 60 years, and, despite claims of a new dawn at the Pentagon, putting-green pork is still par for the course.
“The military shouldn’t be in the golf resort business.”
“The military shouldn’t be in the golf resort business,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending.
The courses instead tend to serve a clientele of military retirees and dependents. Some are open to public membership. Service members, he said, are seldom primary beneficiaries. “They don’t have the spare time to go golfing for hours during the week,” Murphy said.
Even at a time of rampant cost-cutting across the federal government — including calls from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to cut as many as 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs — the U.S military’s golf habit is not on chopping block.
“This is reflective of a broader disconnect between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and its actions, particularly when it comes to Pentagon spending,” Murphy said. “Just like you don’t pour money into sand traps if your goal is defense, you don’t give Congress the go-ahead to boost Pentagon spending by $100 billion if your goal is to cut wasteful spending at the Pentagon.”
Critics have called out the Pentagon on its golf courses for at least six decades. In 1965, the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) cited the Pentagon for spending almost $2 million on land to build an 18-hole golf course at Fort Gordon (now Fort Eisenhower), Georgia, when there was already a nine-hole course at the base. The agency said the property should be sold off.
Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., said in 1975 that the $14 million a year spent on the Defense Department’s 300 courses, including 19 in foreign countries, was a “waste of the taxpayers money.” He complained that the funds came “directly out of the defense budget.” It took until the late 1980s for Congress to finally curb the use of such appropriated funds for military golf courses.
In the decades since, the Pentagon’s golf courses — run by the military’s Morale, Welfare, and Recreation as well as Marine Corps Community Services programs — have shrunk in number. The Intercept counted about 145 golf courses, although this is something of an understatement. The Army owns 54 separate golf courses, and while some are just nine holes, many others have the standard 18 holes and still others boast 27 or even 36 holes. The Intercept also counted 51 courses for the Air Force, 29 for the Navy, and 10 for the Marine Corps.
Military courses are classified as revenue-generating programs that should provide “for a majority” of their operating expenses or be supported by other sources of revenue, such as military bowling alleys and eateries, as well as outside donations. Golf course funding is not supposed to come from congressional appropriations, and Pentagon boosters have long wielded this as a cudgel in defense of the military’s golf obsession. But critics question why such funds are used for putting greens instead of troops.
“If the Pentagon and the armed services want to raise private money to supplement support activities for members of the military,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “it would be better spent bolstering services for personnel suffering from PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and other negative consequences of serving in war zones — services that are underfunded currently.”
As with many Pentagon policies, regulations governing military golf courses aren’t as simple as they seem. For one, there are loopholes that allow golf courses “in foreign countries or isolated installations within the United States” to receive appropriated funds. This is no small matter since Defense Department golf courses dot the world.
The Air Force, alone, boasts overseas golf courses from the Alpine Golf Course at Aviano Air Base in Italy, and Hodja Lakes Golf Course at Incirlik Air Base in Türkiye, to Tama Hills Golf Resort at Yokota Air Base in Japan, and West Winds Golf Course at Kunsan Air Base in South Korea. All told, there are at least two dozen DoD courses in foreign countries, not to mention two in the U.S. island territory of Guam. And even when host nations defray the cost of upkeep, golf-related spending still raises questions about Pentagon priorities. Senate investigators found, for instance, that while Japan paid $2.9 million for golf course netting at the Army’s Camp Zama in the 2010s, the money could have been better spent on constructing a much-needed fire station on a U.S. base.
Whether military golf courses actually generate profit and conduct repairs and improvements exclusively with non-appropriated funds has also been as much aspiration as a hard and fast rule. When the General Accounting Office examined Defense Department golf courses in the 1990s, investigators found courses losing money or using taxpayer funding at 40 percent of the bases analyzed. Of 10 bases inspected, two had courses that lost $43,645 and $225,546, respectively, in a single year. Another two bases used congressionally appropriated funds for their golf courses, including maintenance of a golf clubhouse and repairs to golf course structures.
Since then, stories have regularly bubbled up about financially troubled military courses that turn out to be more boondoggle than boon. In 2013, the Pelican Point Golf Course at Florida’s Tyndall Air Force Base shut down after running an average annual deficit of $270,000 for the better part of a decade. It was the same story at Marshallia Ranch Golf Course at Vandenberg Air Force (now Space Force) Base in California. “The golf course has been losing money for nearly 10 consecutive years,” Col. J. Christopher Moss said in 2016. Silver Spruce Golf Course on Peterson Space Force Base closed in 2022 after “hemorrhaging” $1.2 million over a decade. And last year, Mesquite Grove Golf Course located on Dyess Air Force Base in Texas closed, having lost $450,000 in 2023 and $2.5 million, in total, over 14 years.
In 2017, scandal swirled around a nine-hole golf course, tucked away on the grounds of the U.S. Armed Forces Retirement Home in D.C., which had been blowing taxpayer dollars on course upkeep for a quarter-century. An investigation by Todd Weiler, then the assistant secretary of defense with oversight over the AFRH, found the agency was plagued by a “lack of financial oversight and business acumen.”
Weiler discovered that the golf course was drawing on its trust fund, which included congressionally appropriated money as well as 50-cent deductions from paychecks of military enlistees, to pay for the course’s maintenance. Due to a bureaucratic quirk — while its CEO reports to the defense secretary, the agency is technically embedded in the executive branch — the course was skirting the department regulations that are supposed to bar taxes from paying for golf. “I knew they were violating Defense Department policy, but as they are going to point out, they don’t have to abide by it,” Weiler explained at the time. “But I mean, do you need a specific law to tell you not to spend taxpayer money on a golf course?” (A 2023 GAO report found the AFRH was still financially troubled and faced a plummeting trust fund.)
In May 2018, the Air Force Academy in Colorado celebrated the opening of a new clubhouse at the Eisenhower Golf Course. Carlos Cruz-Gonzalez, the Academy’s deputy director for installations, boasted that clubhouse construction was completely covered by funds generated by Air Force Morale, Welfare, and Recreation programs. “It wasn’t paid for with tax dollars,” he said at the time. “It was built by funds from the Air Force Non-Appropriated Funds programs, generated by services such as outdoor rec, the clubs and bowling alleys.”
“Taxpayers have historically had to cover some of the costs associated with golf course renovations like these.”
The Intercept discovered a contract announcement that appears to contradict Cruz-Gonzalez’s boasts, noting that costs were paid with a mix of non-appropriated funds and appropriated operation and maintenance funds. The 16,500-square foot clubhouse, which serves two 18-hole golf courses, has two elevators, “high end commercial kitchen equipment,” locker rooms for golfers, a pro shop, and large capacity community rooms, including a banquet facility with “breathtaking views of the magnificent Rocky Mountains”; Tavern 34 Lounge, a bar serving “specialty drinks”; and The Grill, a restaurant that the Air Force says “serves up excellent breakfast and lunch fare.” All told, the facility cost more than $7 million in non-appropriated money and almost $300,000 in so-called O&M funding.
“This contract announcement confirms that taxpayers have historically had to cover some of the costs associated with golf course renovations like these. The fact that these funds are coming out of the Pentagon’s Operation and Maintenance accounts is also troubling,” said Taxpayers for Common Sense’s Murphy. “Operations and Maintenance funding is the backbone of U.S. military operations, yet each year, Congress routinely siphons money from O&M to pay for parochial increases to the Pentagon budget. It seems the Pentagon is also happy to raid O&M, at least when there’s a golf course club house on the line.”
The Air Force Academy acknowledged a request from comment from The Intercept but did not provide one prior to publication.
The Trump administrationannounced this week that hundreds of federal properties were available for sale, as part of an effort to shrink the federal real estate portfolio and the size of government. The General Services Administration, the government’s real estate arm, released a list of 443 structures and properties deemed “not core to government operations.” A GSA spokesperson said such assets cost over $430 million annually to operate and maintain. The GSA’s list of properties was, however, withdrawn a day later.
Currently, no military golf courses are up for sale on the GSA’s website. The Intercept sent questions to the GSA by email and was instructed to then “call for assistance.” The GSA’s phone systems were, however, out of order.
The Department of Government Efficiency — which boasts of achieving savings through a combination of efforts including “asset sales” — did not reply to questions about the possible sale of DoD golf courses.
Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin who retired from Congress in 2024 and is one of the most outspoken critics of the Pentagon’s mammoth property portfolio, has called for a sale of the military’s golf courses. “The Defense Department owns a property book in the hundreds of billions of dollars — and a lot of that is things like golf courses that the Pentagon does not need to own,” he said last year. “We can recycle those assets and take the savings and invest it in quality training and living conditions for our troops.”
“You don’t need to be a military strategist to understand that Pentagon-operated golf courses are not essential to national security.”
The Pentagon did not provide an estimate of the total worth of its golf courses, but The Intercept found, using recent Pentagon property data, that the costs to replace just the facilities (buildings and other structures) on five golf courses — two in Germany and one each in Japan, Korea, and Massachusetts — total more than $200 million. Add in the structures on another 140 military golf courses and factor in the cost of the land, and the value must be astronomical.
“You don’t need to be a military strategist to understand that Pentagon-operated golf courses are not essential to national security. The Pentagon should be looking at all of its infrastructure and proposing reductions to address excess capacity, which it has said rests at about 19 percent,” Murphy told The Intercept by email. “A new Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process could save taxpayers billions of dollars per year by shedding excess infrastructure, and closing the Pentagon’s golf courses should be part of that process.”
President Donald Trump walks to Marine One after golfing at Trump National Golf Club on Nov. 27, 2020, in Sterling, Va.Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Profligate spending on golf is de rigueur under President Donald Trump, who reportedly played at least 289 rounds of golf, at a cost to taxpayers of at least $150 million for travel and security, during his first term. In 2019, Trump also faced corruption allegations following reports that U.S. military personnel were frequently staying at a Trump golf resort in Scotland. He countered that he was not enriching himself, but that he was instead losing money as a result.
Trump had, by the middle of last month, already spent around $11 million in taxpayer dollars on golf this year. Each trip to his Florida country club Mar-a-Lago costs, on average, $3.4 million, including travel on Air Force One, limousines for Trump’s motorcade, and the stationing of armed boats nearby, according to a 2019 GAO report. The DoD incurred most of these costs. Ironically, Trump could save taxpayers money by playing at the many military golf courses closer to the White House, such as the two 18-hole championship golf courses at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, the Marine Corps’ Medal of Honor Golf Course in Virginia, the two championship 18-hole golf courses at the Army’s Fort Belvoir Golf Club also in Virginia, or at the Armed Forces Retirement Home course in Washington, D.C.
While critics have called out the Pentagon’s frivolous focus on golf for at least 60 years, the DoD has consistently played through. During that time, the U.S. military has been mired in losses and stalemates from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, to Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. In each conflict, the U.S. military killed far more people than it has lost on the battlefield, but in none was it able to achieve victory. Despite this, Hegseth remains obsessed with the idea of lethality at all costs. His department, however, continues to divide its attention between the battlefield and the fairway.
“Secretary Hegseth’s focus on ‘lethality, lethality, lethality’ is a very narrow view of who our military personnel are and what they should be focused on. Ideally, our military is a defensive force that is much more than just a killing machine,” said Hartung, before drawing attention to Hegseth’s recent efforts to eliminate diversity programs at the Pentagon. “If he wants to strip down what he sees as extraneous activities, it is the height of folly to eliminate programs designed to curb racism and misogyny in the ranks — which are deeply divisive when they are not dealt with — while continuing to support things like golf courses which have nothing to do with promoting his goal of a more capable fighting force.”
AMY GOODMAN: President Trump addressed a joint session of Congress in a highly partisan 100-minute speech, the longest presidential address to Congress in modern history on Wednesday.
Trump defended his sweeping actions over the past six weeks.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years or eight years, and we are just getting started.
AMY GOODMAN: President Trump praised his biggest campaign donor, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who’s leading Trump’s effort to dismantle key government agencies and cut critical government services.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And to that end, I have created the brand-new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Perhaps.
Which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight. Thank you, Elon. He’s working very hard. He didn’t need this. He didn’t need this. Thank you very much. We appreciate it.
AMY GOODMAN: Some Democrats laughed and pointed at Elon Musk when President Trump made this comment later in his speech.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s very simple. And the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over.
AMY GOODMAN: During his speech, President Trump repeatedly attacked the trans and immigrant communities, defended his tariffs that have sent stock prices spiraling, vowed to end Russia’s war on Ukraine and threatened to take control of Greenland.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We also have a message tonight for the incredible people of Greenland: We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America. We need Greenland for national security and even international security, and we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it.
But we need it, really, for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it.
‘A declaration of war against the American people.’ Video: Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN: During Trump’s 100-minute address, Democratic lawmakers held up signs in protest reading “This is not normal,” “Save Medicaid” and “Musk steals.”
One Democrat, Congressmember Al Green of Texas, was removed from the chamber for protesting against the President.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Likewise, small business optimism saw its single-largest one-month gain ever recorded, a 41-point jump.
REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMEMBER 1: Sit down!
REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMEMBER 2: Order!
SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: Members are directed to uphold and maintain decorum in the House and to cease any further disruptions. That’s your warning. Members are engaging in willful and continuing breach of decorum, and the chair is prepared to direct the sergeant-at-arms to restore order to the joint session.
Mr Green, take your seat. Take your seat, sir.
DEMOCRAT CONGRESS MEMBER AL GREEN: He has no mandate to cut Medicaid!
SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: Take your seat. Finding that members continue to engage in willful and concerted disruption of proper decorum, the chair now directs the sergeant-at-arms to restore order, remove this gentleman from the chamber.
AMY GOODMAN: That was House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called in security to take Texas Democratic Congressmember Al Green out. Afterwards, Green spoke to reporters after being removed.
Democrat Congressman Al Green (Texas) . . . “I have people who are very fearful. These are poor people, and they have only Medicaid in their lives when it comes to their healthcare.” Image: DN screenshot APR
DEMOCRAT CONGRESS MEMBER AL GREEN: The President said he had a mandate, and I was making it clear to the President that he has no mandate to cut Medicaid.
I have people who are very fearful. These are poor people, and they have only Medicaid in their lives when it comes to their healthcare. And I want him to know that his budget calls for deep cuts in Medicaid.
He needs to save Medicaid, protect it. We need to raise the cap on Social Security. There’s a possibility that it’s going to be hurt. And we’ve got to protect Medicare.
These are the safety net programmes that people in my congressional district depend on. And this President seems to care less about them and more about the number of people that he can remove from the various programmes that have been so helpful to so many people.
AMY GOODMAN: Texas Democratic Congressmember Al Green.
We begin today’s show with Ralph Nader, the longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic, former presidential candidate. Ralph Nader is founder of the Capitol Hill Citizen newspaper. His most recent lead article in the new issue of Capitol Hill Citizen is titled “Democratic Party: Apologise to America for ushering Trump back in.”
Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, all these different programmes. Ralph Nader, respond overall to President Trump’s, well, longest congressional address in modern history.
Environmentalist and consumer protection activist Ralph Nader . . . And he’s taken Biden’s genocidal policies one step further by demanding the evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza. Image: DN screenshot APR
RALPH NADER: Well, it was also a declaration of war against the American people, including Trump voters, in favour of the super-rich and the giant corporations. What Trump did last night was set a record for lies, delusionary fantasies, predictions of future broken promises — a rerun of his first term — boasts about progress that don’t exist.
In practice, he has launched a trade war. He has launched an arms race with China and Russia. He has perpetuated and even worsened the genocidal support against the Palestinians. He never mentioned the Palestinians once.
And he’s taken Biden’s genocidal policies one step further by demanding the evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza.
But taking it as a whole, Amy, what we’re seeing here defies most of dictionary adjectives. What Trump and Musk and Vance and the supine Republicans are doing are installing an imperial, militaristic domestic dictatorship that is going to end up in a police state.
You can see his appointments are yes people bent on suppression of civil liberties, civil rights. You can see his breakthrough, after over 120 years, of announcing conquest of Panama Canal.
He’s basically said, one way or another, he’s going to take Greenland. These are not just imperial controls of countries overseas or overthrowing them; it’s actually seizing land.
Now, on the Greenland thing, Greenland is a province of Denmark, which is a member of NATO. He is ready to basically conquer a part of Denmark in violation of Section 5 of NATO, at the same time that he has displayed full-throated support for a hardcore communist dictator, Vladimir Putin, who started out with the Russian version of the CIA under the Soviet Union and now has over 20 years of communist dictatorship, allied, of course, with a number of oligarchs, a kind of kleptocracy.
And the Republicans are buying all this in Congress. This is complete reversal of everything that the Republicans stood for against communist dictators.
So, what we’re seeing here is a phony programme of government efficiency ripping apart people’s programmes. The attack on Social Security is new, complete lies about millions of people aged 110, 120, getting Social Security cheques.
That’s a new attack. He left Social Security alone in his first term, but now he’s going after [it]. So, what they’re going to do is cut Medicaid and cut other social safety nets in order to pay for another tax cut for the super-rich and the corporation, throwing in no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security benefits, which will, of course, further increase the deficit and give the lie to his statement that he wants a balanced budget.
So we’re dealing with a deranged, unstable pathological liar, who’s getting away with it. And the question is: How does he get away with it, year after year? Because the Democratic Party has basically collapsed.
They don’t know how to deal with a criminal recidivist, a person who has hired workers without documents and exploited them, a person who’s a bigot against immigrants, including legal immigrants who are performing totally critical tasks in home healthcare, processing poultry, meat, and half of the construction workers in Texas are undocumented workers.
So, as a bully, he doesn’t go after the construction industry in Texas; he picks out individuals.
I thought the most disgraceful thing, Amy, yesterday was his use of these unfortunate people who suffered as props, holding one up after another. But they were also Trump’s crutches to cover up his contradictory behavior.
So, he praised the police yesterday, but he pardoned over 600 people who attacked violently the police [in the attack on the Capitol] on 6 January 2021 and were convicted and imprisoned as a result, and he let them out of prison. I thought the most —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ralph? Ralph, I —
RALPH NADER: — the most heartrending thing was that 13-year-old child, who wanted to be a police officer when he grew up, being held up twice by his father. And he was so bewildered as to what was going on. And Trump’s use of these people was totally reprehensible and should be called out.
Now, more basically, the real inefficiencies in government, they’re ignoring, because they are kleptocrats. They’re ignoring corporate crimes on Medicaid, Medicare, tens of billions of dollars every year ripping off Medicare, ripping off government contracts, such as defence contracts.
He’s ignoring hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare, including that doled out to Elon Musk — subsidies, handouts, giveaways, bailouts, you name it. And he’s ignoring the bloated military budget, which he is supporting the Republicans in actually increasing the military budget more than the generals have asked for. So, that’s the revelation —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ralph? Ralph, if I — Ralph, if I can interrupt? I just need to —
RALPH NADER: — that the Democrats need to pursue.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ralph, I wanted to ask you about — specifically about Medicaid and Medicare. You’ve mentioned the cuts to these safety net programmes. What about Medicaid, especially the crisis in this country in long-term care? What do you see happening in this Trump administration, especially with the Republican majority in Congress?
RALPH NADER: Well, they’re going to slash — they’re going to move to slash Medicaid, which serves over 71 million people, including millions of Trump voters, who should be reconsidering their vote as the days pass, because they’re being exploited in red states, blue states, everywhere, as well.
Yeah, they have to cut tens of billions of dollars a year from Medicaid to pay for the tax cut. That’s number one. Now they’re going after Social Security. Who knows what the next step will be on Medicare? They’re leaving Americans totally defenceless by slashing meat and poultry and food inspection laws, auto safety.
They’re exposing people to climate violence by cutting FEMA, the rescue agency. They’re cutting forest rangers that deal with wildfires. They’re cutting protections against pandemics and epidemics by slashing and ravaging and suppressing free speech in scientific circles, like CDC and National Institutes of Health.
They’re leaving the American people defenseless.
And where are the Democrats on this? I mean, look at Senator Slotkin’s response. It was a typical rerun of a feeble, weak Democratic rebuttal. She couldn’t get herself, just like the Democrats in 2024, which led to Trump’s victory — they can’t get themselves, Juan, to talk specifically and authentically about raising the minimum wage, expanding healthcare, cracking down on corporate crooks that are bleeding out the incomes of hard-pressed American workers and the poor.
They can’t get themselves to talk about increasing frozen Social Security budgets for 50 years, that 200 Democrats supported raising, but Nancy Pelosi kept them, when she was Speaker, from taking John Larson’s bill to the House floor.
That’s why they lose. Look at her speech. It was so vague and general. They chose her because she was in the national security state. She was a former CIA. They chose her because they wanted to promote the losing version of the Democratic Party, instead of choosing Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, the most popular polled politician in America today.
That’s who they chose. So, as long as the Democrats monopolise the opposition and crush third-party efforts to push them into more progressive realms, the Republican, plutocratic, Wall Street, war machine declaration of war against the American people will continue.
We’re heading into the most serious crisis in American history. There’s no comparison.
AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, we’re going to have to leave it there, but, of course, we’re going to continue to cover these issues. And I also wanted to wish you, Ralph, a happy 91st birthday. Ralph Nader —
RALPH NADER: I wish people to get the Capitol Hill Citizen, which tells people what they can really do to win democracy and justice back. So, for $5 or donation or more, if you wish, you can go to Capitol Hill Citizen and get a copy sent immediately by first-class mail, or more copies for your circle, of resisting and protesting and prevailing over this Trump dictatorship.
AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic, four-time presidential candidate, founder of the Capitol Hill Citizen newspaper. This is Democracy Now!
The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence. Republished by Asia Pacific Report under Creative Commons.
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency began its cost-cutting efforts by dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, which spends about $22 billion per year, about 0.3 percent of overall federal spending. DOGE has since targeted agencies focused on children’s education, protecting the natural world, and food safety.
But after more than a month running roughshod through government, DOGE has made strikingly few cuts at the Pentagon, whose bloated budget tips the scales at around $850 billion — accounting for about 13 percent of federal spending.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth encouraged DOGE to hack away at his department on X last week. “We welcome DOGE and finding those efficiencies is how we save taxpayer dollars.” But experts question just how open the Pentagon really is to DOGE, and whether Musk’s merry band of bean-counters has the mettle to do battle with the Department of Defense and its backers.
On DOGE’s “Agency Efficiency Leaderboard,” which shows some of the largest “savings” it has claimed to achieve, the Defense Department is currently wallowing in 16th place out of a total of 22 spots. It’s an especially dismal showing since Defense is the largest government agency, with a budget rocketing toward $1 trillion per year, and has failed seven straight annual audits. The U.S. military budget is the largest in the world — more than triple that of China, 8.5 times higher than Russia, and exceeds the next nine countries combined. Military expenditures are the largest component of discretionary spending in the U.S. budget and are projected to rise over the next decade.
If agencies devoted to saving lives — such as the Department of Health and Human Services or USAID — are on the chopping block, a department that has spent some $8 trillion on foreign wars since 9/11 deserves a close look by DOGE. Potential cuts aren’t hard to find: The Intercept easily sketched a road map amounting to more than $75 billionin annual savings for Musk and DOGE — and as much as $2 trillion over the next decade.
That figure dwarfs the $65 billion DOGE claims to have already saved taxpayers through a combination of “fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.” Independent analyses say many of DOGE cuts so far have been overstated or are ephemeral, with some contract cancellations double or triple-counted. The Intercept, for instance, found that DOGE’s claim of saving taxpayers nearly $232 million by canceling an IT contract for the Social Security Administration was off by about $231 million.
It’s obvious that the Defense Department is ripe for cost-cutting. The question is whether DOGE — which is neither a federal executive department nor headed by Musk and may well be unconstitutional — is up for a fight with the department, its contractors, and their backers on Capitol Hill. One Pentagon official said that DOGE has so far taken on “weak” agencies, but that Musk’s cost-cutters will be “steamrolled” if they lock horns with the Defense Department. The official offered comments on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the media.
The Defense Department’s press office failed to respond to The Intercept’s questions about DOGE’s efforts. DOGE did not reply to repeated requests for comment sent to the agency’s X account.
“Cuts to the astronomical Pentagon budget have been urgent for a long time — not just because of rampant waste, fraud, and abuse, but because a disproportionately high amount of U.S. taxpayer dollars go to war and preparation for war,” Stephanie Savell, the director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, told The Intercept. “Let’s see if the vested interests of the military–industrial complex will allow for any real changes to take place as a result of what, so far, is largely rhetoric.”
There is plenty of low-hanging fruit that can catapult the Pentagon to the top spot on DOGE’s leaderboard. That’s if DOGE can resist the Pentagon pressure that has allowed the department to wring an endless stream of tax dollars out of Congress — scaring, beguiling, flattering, and battering both sides of the aisle into regularly increasing the budget despite a string of losses and stalemates stretching from the Korean War to the Afghanistan War to the forever war still sputtering away in Somalia.
Major savings at the Pentagon can be found through the reduction or elimination of dysfunctional, expensive, or dangerous weapon systems like the F-35 combat aircraft; vulnerable Navy ships with limited utility like a new generation of aircraft carriers; and the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program, according to William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft who has been digging into Pentagon budgets for decades.
The F-35 combat aircraft is a bloated boondoggle, and it’s already on Musk’s radar. More than two decades in, the F-35 is still suffering from key flaws in its software and hardware — a total of 873 unresolved defects, according to one Pentagon analysis. If it’s allowed to run its course, the F-35 will be the most expensive weapons program in history, at a total cost of $1.7 trillion. Musk has called it “the worst military value for money in history.” It’s perfect for a splash cut to save big money and put the Pentagon on notice that the days of milk and honey are done. Nixing the program now would save an estimated $13 billion a year, according to Hartung.
Aircraft carriers are another cakewalk cut. New models have been plagued by defects, such as aircraft launch systems. The ships themselves are also especially vulnerable to new high-speed, long-range missiles. Continuing to build them courts catastrophic losses in a future great power conflict.
Each new aircraft carrier scuttled would save at least $13 billion, Hartung said.
If DOGE wants to really get serious, there is an easy path to saving close to a trillion dollars over 10 years at the Pentagon and Department of Energy — and a spot atop the DOGE leaderboard for all time. Plus, President Donald Trump has suggested he’s onboard with it.
The United States is in the midst of a 30-year, $2 trillion plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines. The U.S. is already shelling out $75 billion each year — the equivalent of two Manhattan Projects annually — on new nuclear weapons. The commander-in-chief thinks it’s a ludicrous idea. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” Trump announced earlier this month, calling for new nuclear arms control negotiations with Russia and China. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”
First on the chopping block should be America’s new intercontinental ballistic missile, the Sentinel, which set off alarm bells when its cost overruns triggered a so-called Nunn-McCurdy breach: occurring if the cost of developing a new program increases by 25 percent or more. The Sentinel ICBM project — which involves not only building missiles but also modernizing 450 silos across five states, launch control centers, nuclear missile bases, and testing facilities — is already 81 percent overbudget, with costs skyrocketing to more than $140 billion. Worse yet, former Defense Secretary William Perry called ICBMs “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because a president would have just minutes to decide on launching them, increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war resulting from a false alarm.
Saving taxpayer dollars with this cut could also save the world from nuclear annihilation. It’s a win-win far more rewarding than DOGE cuts to USAID which have left people starving and screaming in pain from hunger.
For decades, the U.S. has also poured hundreds of billions of dollars into what the Pentagon calls “missile defeat and defense,” which includes short, medium, and long-range systems to counter enemy ICBMs. The history of missile defense systems is, however, a history of failure.
The Government Accountability Office found that the Missile Defense Agency did not meet its planned testing goals in 2019 due to significant “developmental delays,” continuing “a decade-long trend in which MDA ha[d] been unable to achieve its fiscal year flight testing as scheduled.” That same year, the Pentagon canceled its Redesigned Kill Vehicle program due to technical design flaws.
It was just the latest in a long list of missile defense duds including $2.2 billion spent on worthless sea-based radar and $2.7 billion squandered on an unsuccessful blimp-based radar system. Keeping these programs on the books is a waste and cutting them, Hartung told The Intercept, would save $10 to $15 billion per year.
DOGE has been handing out pink slips all across the government, firing Forest Service personnel whose work helps tamp down wildfires, workers responding to the bird flu outbreak, and inspectors general who conduct audits and fight fraud. But somehow, the mammoth Pentagon workforce has been largely exempt.
“The Pentagon doesn’t even have an accurate count of how many contract employees it funds.”
The Pentagon is swimming in personnel of all sorts — most of them devoted, in some way, to killing people and destroying things. The department has more than 700,000 full-time civilian workers, about one-third of the total federal civilian workforce, as well as 2.5 million troops — including more than 1.2 million active-duty personnel. The Department of Defense also employs around 500,000 civilian contractors, according to the best available numbers. These people and their benefits cost taxpayers tons of money. Yet the department announced that it was cutting a mere 5,400 probationary workers this week and will put a hiring freeze in place. Uniformed military personnel are, however, exempt.
Donald Trump talks to a pilot in the cockpit of an F-35 aircraft at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz., on Oct. 19, 2018.Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP
Reducing the civilian work force by 150,000 – 200,000 and a comparable cut in contract employees would result in dramatic savings, according to Hartung. “On average, contractors cost more than civilian government employees, carry out redundant functions, and are less carefully monitored. The Pentagon doesn’t even have an accurate count of how many contract employees it funds,” he told The Intercept. “Cutting contract spending by 15 percent could save $26 billion per year.”
He cautions, however, against quick-and-dirty massive layoffs and recommends a slower pace to make sure that essential functions aren’t impacted.
Last week, Hegseth reportedly ordered senior Pentagon officials and military brass to develop plans for cutting 8 percent from the defense budget in each of the next five years. It turned out, however, that the plan called not for cuts but for savings to be shifted to programs most favored by the administration — with many types of spending, from military operations at the southern border to the acquisition of submarines, preemptively off the table.
If DOGE wants to prove its independence and pursue real cost-cutting, it can call out Hegseth and pursue a real 8 percent cut. Nixing the F-35 program and missile defense programs, plus a 15 percent cut in private contractors, would net $26 billion in savings annually — something in the neighborhood of a 9 percent reduction in the current proposed Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2025.
But why stop at 9 percent?
Trump himself recently suggested that a warming of U.S. relations with Russia and China could result in massive Pentagon budget cuts. “I’m going to say there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on the military. … I’m going to say we can spend this on other things,” Trump said. “I want to say let’s cut our military budget in half. And we can do that.”
Hartung said that with some effort, and over about five years or more, a 50 percent cut is possible if the U.S. were to vastly reduce the size of the U.S. military; shutter the majority of the sprawling empire of U.S. overseas bases; and make significant cuts in Navy ships, ground vehicles, and nuclear weapons programs. He said that, over a decade, the U.S. could shed up to $2 trillion in military spending.
“That would mean abandoning America’s ‘cover the globe’ military strategy in favor of a genuinely defensive approach, and one would have to make sure that cuts in legacy systems weren’t just filled in with drones and other emerging tech,” he explained.
Then the question becomes: What to do with those savings?
“We need a better balance between military spending and investments in diplomacy, development, humanitarian aid, global public health, and environmental protection,” Hartung said. “Some of our biggest existential threats are not military in nature — such as climate change and pandemics.”
“There is an F-35 caucus in Congress, there are parts suppliers in 46 states, and it has fierce backers.”
Savell similarly called for plowing Pentagon savings into programs addressing health care and combating climate change, which she said would provide real security for Americans.
Experts are, however, still skeptical DOGE can stand up to the military-industrial-congressional complex and believe that even deep-sixing one boondoggle program like the F-35 could prove beyond Musk’s capacity. “They’ll have a huge fight because there is an F-35 caucus in Congress, there are parts suppliers in 46 states, and it has fierce backers,” said Hartung. “There are even members of Congress who recognize that the F-35 is terrible and that it’s like pouring money down a rat hole but say it’s too late to do anything about it.”
The Pentagon official predicted that DOGE would make “cosmetic” cuts that might put people out of work and would root out anything that could be cast as related to climate change and diversity, equality, and inclusion programs. But don’t expect meaningful Defense savings from Trump and DOGE. “You heard it here,” the official said. “They might shift money around but they aren’t going to gut DoD.”
Hours before Tulsi Gabbard appeared for a combative hearing on her nomination as director of national intelligence on Thursday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave some public advice to the woman who once pushed for his pardon.
“Tulsi Gabbard will be required to disown all prior support for whistleblowers as a condition of confirmation today. I encourage her to do so. Tell them I harmed national security and the sweet, soft feelings of staff. In D.C., that’s what passes for the pledge of allegiance,” Snowden said on X.
Even after facing more than a dozen questions about Snowden, however, Gabbard refused to back down.
Instead, Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Snowden broke the law and that she would no longer push for his pardon — but that he had revealed blatant violations of the Constitution.
“The fact is he also, even as he broke the law, released information that exposed egregious illegal and unconstitutional programs happening within our government that led to serious reforms that Congress undertook,” Gabbard said.
Gabbard has shifted many positions over the years, but her refusal to disavow Snowden may have endangered an already shaky confirmation. Senators from both parties expressed concerns on her stances on issues as varied as Snowden, NSA spying law, her criticisms of Ukraine and NATO after Russia’s invasion, and her skepticism that former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad oversaw gruesome chemical weapons attacks on his own people.
Intelligence Committee members were preparing to enter a closed session for further questioning of Gabbard on Thursday. Chair Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said he hoped to schedule a confirmation vote “as soon as possible.”
If Thursday’s questioning was any indication, the vote could hinge on Gabbard’s position on Snowden.
As a Democratic U.S. representative, Gabbard in 2020 co-sponsored a resolution with then-Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., calling on the Justice Department to drop all charges against Snowden. In interviews, she called for a full-pledged pardon of a man she said had acted in the “public interest.”
It was the kind of break with the intelligence community consensus in Washington, D.C., that endeared her to Trump, whom she endorsed during the election last year before announcing that she had switched to the Republican Party.
It did not, however, endear her to members of the Intelligence Committee who have cast Snowden as a Russian asset. At least seven members of the committee, which is stacked with surveillance hawks, asked Gabbard hostile questions about Snowden.
“Is Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States of America? That is not a hard question to answer when the stakes are this high.”
Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., asked Gabbard the same question three times, the last time his voice rising to a shout: “Was Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States of America?”
Gabbard said that Snowden “broke the law” — but declined to give a yes or no response.
“Is Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States of America? That is not a hard question to answer when the stakes are this high,” Bennet shot back.
Gabbard told several senators that she was focused on the future and hoped to prevent future leaks with a four-point plan: making sure there are no more illegal intelligence-gathering programs, publicizing existing channels for intelligence agency whistleblowers, limiting access to classified information through security clearance reform, and giving would-be whistleblowers a “direct line to me.”
Gabbard cannot afford to lose a single Republican in the committee for a positive referral and only three in the full Senate. Several suggested Thursday that they remained concerned about her position on Snowden.
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said intelligence agency staffers were concerned about Gabbard’s position on Snowden.
“They don’t see him as brave. They see him as a traitor,” Lankford said. “They want to hear that you also believe the same — that not just that he broke the law, but that he’s a traitor, because they don’t want that to ever happen again.”
At one point Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., even waived a printout of Snowden’s post on X in the air, seemingly daring Gabbard to follow his advice. The substance of her answer to him did not change, however.
Elsewhere during the hearing, Gabbard was asked repeatedly about her position on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the FBI to search through intelligence the NSA collects while ostensibly targeting foreigners.
Privacy advocates say the law effectively creates a backdoor for the FBI to scoop up information by and about Americans, many of whose communications are caught up in collection directed abroad.
Under questioning from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Gabbard said she supported adding a warrant requirement to the legislation that would force the FBI to receive court approval for such searches.
However, she struck a more equivocal tone in response to another question on the top from Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
“There are many different ways to do this. The devil is in the details,” Gabbard said.
Tulsi Gabbard’s support for pardoning Edward Snowden made her one of Donald Trump’s more intriguing picks when she was nominated for director of national intelligence. It has also made her one of his most vulnerable.
Gabbard is set to face pointed questioning from Republican supporters of government spying powers at her confirmation hearing Thursday, and her answers will reveal whether she is willing to flip-flop to secure the post.
Will Gabbard, a former member of Congress who has a long history of switching positions and even parties, change her tune as she already has done on National Security Agency spy powers? The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but senators exiting a closed-door Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday said to stay tuned.
“We have talked about it privately, and we will certainly talk about it publicly,” said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who has called Snowden a “traitor.”
A Pardon Too Far
Trump has enthusiastically wielded his pardon Sharpie, but one name so far has failed to cross his desk.
For years, supporters of Snowden have urged presidents in both major parties to grant him a pardon in recognition of his consequential leaks in 2013, which revealed both the breadth of NSA spying and the way the government had warped the law to enable it.
Snowden, who has lived in Russia after receiving asylum there when his passport was revoked en route to Ecuador, was charged with Espionage Act violations that carry up to 30 years in prison. Those charges are still pending, despite several court rulings that the programs he revealed violated the law. As recently as last month, a judge ruled that one of the programs which Snowden helped to expose was unconstitutional.
In 2020, Trump mused about giving Snowden a pardon after previously calling him a “traitor,” but never followed through.
That same year, Gabbard co-sponsored with former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., a resolution calling on the government to drop all charges against Snowden. After Trump granted his former national security adviser Mike Flynn a pardon, Gabbard urged him to pardon Snowden as well.
“Since you’re giving pardons to people, please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state,” she said.
Her position made her stand out from many members of Congress, according to Alex Marthews, national chair of Restore the Fourth, a nonprofit organization that opposes government spying and supports a pardon.
“She was not alone, but it was an unusual position to take. There was outrage on the part of many members of Congress at the programs that were revealed, but it was also politically convenient for them to decry the manner in which they have been revealed, even if there was no other realistic way that they would have been revealed,” he said.
Five years later, Gabbard’s call for mercy has become a cause for concern for Snowden’s many enemies on the Senate Intelligence Committee, long home to some of the most fervent surveillance supporters and Snowden haters. Committee member Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who is considered one of the swing votes on Gabbard’s nomination, called her past support of Snowden a “concern.”
Lankford and Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said Tuesday that the issue has come up repeatedly in closed-door meetings with senators, but both declined to describe her response.
“I don’t know anyone that it hasn’t come up with,” Lankford said. “I’m going to let her answer all of her own questions when she gets in front of us.”
Relief Still Sought
As recently as November, the New York Post reported that Gabbard still considered a pardon important and planned to push for it in office, citing “a person close to Gabbard.” However, New York Times reporting Wednesday suggests that she may distance herself from her past position.
Marthews said he hoped she would stay the course.
“He should not only be pardoned for what he did, he should be honored,” Marthews said.
Gabbard is also likely to face questioning over her position on one of the most controversial laws undergirding NSA spying, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
That law allows the FBI to comb through the text messages, emails, and phone call records of U.S. citizens that the NSA has collected while picking up the communications of foreigners living abroad. Critics say the FBI should be required to get a warrant before searching those communications, and last month, a federal district judge agreed.
The surveillance supporters on the Senate Intelligence Committee have generally pushed back on a warrant requirement, falling in line with government officials such as former FBI Director Christopher Wray, who said last year that it would “blind” federal agents seeking to combat cyberattacks and terrorism.
Gabbard earlier this month issued a statement that did not directly address whether she supports a warrant requirement but reflected a softening of her past criticism of government surveillance. She called the intelligence-gathering program “crucial,” while adding that it “must be safeguarded to protect our nation while ensuring the civil liberties of Americans.”
One of the few Intelligence Committee members to support a warrant requirement, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said he planned to focus on Gabbard’s position on that issue rather than Snowden.
“I’m trying to flesh out what her positions are on 702,” Wyden said.
A case that started a decade ago with a New York City man’s arrest at John F. Kennedy Airport for allegedly trying to join a Pakistani terrorist group has now dealt a setback to government spying powers.
In a decision that could feed into a looming fight over government surveillance, a federal court ruled last month that FBI agents violated the man’s constitutional rights when they searched National Security Agency databases for information on him dozens of times without a warrant.
The decision gives a boost to the surveillance critics who have long asked Congress to impose a warrant requirement on “backdoor” searches of NSA data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA.
Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, has called for “major reform” of Section 702. He faces a Thursday confirmation hearing where surveillance hawks on the Senate Intelligence Committee could grill him about that position. Trump’s other nominees, however, have lined up to back the law.
The parties to the New York City case have not signaled whether they intend to appeal the ruling in the case against Agron Hasbajrami, who remains imprisoned. But if it stands, the decision could play a role in thecongressional debate over the spying law when it expires in April 2026.
“This is a major constitutional ruling on one of the most abused provisions of FISA.”
“This is a major constitutional ruling on one of the most abused provisions of FISA,” Patrick Toomey, the deputy director of American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, said in a statement. “As the court recognized, the FBI’s rampant digital searches of Americans are an immense invasion of privacy, and trigger the bedrock protections of the Fourth Amendment. Section 702 is long overdue for reform by Congress, and this opinion shows why.”
Hasbajrami was arrested in September 2011 as he was trying to fly from JFK to Istanbul, where prosecutors said he planned to fly onward to Pakistan to join a terror group.
His guilty plea and sentencing in January 2013 seemed to settle the case, until the revelations of NSA contractor Edward Snowden months later forced prosecutors to admit that they had failed to disclose the use of surveillance ostensibly directed at foreigners to build the case against him.
Prosecutors admitted that the FBI agents on Hasbajrami’s case had trawled NSA databases to turn up key information on him, without applying for a warrant.
U.S. District Court Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall ruled only last month on the constitutionality of the FBI’s searches. Her decision was released Tuesday in heavily redacted form.
Hall zeroed in on the process by which domestic law enforcement agencies such as the FBI can comb through foreign surveillance databases.
The government argues that the FBI is free to search those databases for information on Americans as long as it follows certain guidelines, and as long as the surveillance originally targeted foreigners outside the U.S. Such surveillance often collects the phone calls, emails, and text messages of U.S. citizens or legal residents such as Hasbajrami communicating with foreigners.
Privacy advocates have long contended that those “backdoor” searches are an end-run around the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right of Americans to be free from unreasonable invasions of privacy. Hall said that in Hasbajrami’s case, she agreed.
“While communications of U.S. persons may nonetheless be intercepted, incidentally or inadvertently, it would be paradoxical to permit warrantless searches of the same information that Section 702 is specifically designed to avoid collecting. To countenance this practice would convert Section 702 into precisely what Defendant has labeled it — a tool for law enforcement to run ‘backdoor searches’ that circumvent the Fourth Amendment,” Hall said.
Hall said that in an investigation that stretched for months, there was no reason why the government could not have sought a warrant. Still, she declined to suppress the emails collected as part of the FBI investigation, finding that FBI agents were acting in “good faith” based on their understanding of the law when they conducted their searches.
The mixed ruling is a boon for civil liberties advocates but does not help Hasbajrami, whose attorneys did not immediately comment on whether he will appeal. They filed a letter in the court record Friday asking Hall to allow them to view parts of her redacted decision.
Andrew Crocker, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which joined the ACLU in filing in a brief in support of Hasbajrami, said the judge’s decision tracked closely with the arguments that surveillance advocates have been making for years. They have fought a nearly decadelong battle in Congress to force law enforcement to obtain a warrant before searching the databases, coming within one vote of victory last year.
The surveillance law will be up for debate again in April 2026. Liberal critics of the law hope to join forces with MAGA skeptics of government overreach to add the warrant provision — and Crocker said he thinks the court’s ruling will help.
“This would be front-and-center in any argument that Congress needs to impose a warrant requirement for these backdoor searches. You have a federal court saying as much, and that tends to be the kind of thing that Congress takes note of,” he said.
During more than four hours of Senate testimony Tuesday, Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth faced a single question about the war in Gaza — and only in response to a Code Pink protest.
Hegseth and Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio touted unconditional support for Israel during confirmation hearings this week, but they faced little scrutiny over the U.S. response to civilian casualties and the risk of mass starvation in Gaza.
Instead, Hegseth fended off questions about his personal character, and Rubio warned about the danger of China. Democrats mostly stuck to a list of questions that did not highlight divisions within their own party.
Pointing to the Hegseth hearing, one advocate lobbying Congress to put more pressure on Israel said he was dismayed by the lack of substance.
“The frustrating part about watching that hearing was the lack of concern for how the United States military could really impact billions of people on this planet,” said Hassan El-Tayyab of the Quaker advocacy group Friends Committee on National Legislation. “There were so many pressing issues and existential issues to the United States, our allies, and the planet at large that were not addressed.”
Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks, sitting Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III has played a key role in the Biden administration’s relationship with Israel, liaising with the Israeli defense minister and overseeing the shipment of weapons such as 2,000-pound bombs to the Israeli military.
“I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.”
Yet while the defense secretary exerts sway over U.S. relations with Israel, the topic barely came up Tuesday during the hearing for his would-be successor. Instead, Hegseth’s hearing was dominated by Democrats’ questions about his drinking habits, sexual assault allegations, and infidelities, and by friendlier questions from Republicans seeking to prop up his nomination.
One of the few breaks from that script came an hour and a half into the hearing, when Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., asked Hegseth a series of questions about Israel. Cotton noted that protesters from the activist group Code Pink had disrupted the hearing with criticisms of Hegseth and asked him to respond.
“I support Israel’s existential war in Gaza. I assume like me and President Trump, you support that war as well, don’t you?” Cotton said.
“Senator, I do,” Hegseth said. “I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.”
The day after Hegseth’s hearing, Rubio faced questioning in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as the details of the Gaza ceasefire were coming into focus. Only a single question, from Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., edged close to criticizing Israel.
“I, by the way, fully support Israel’s ability to respond to Hamas, but I am very concerned about how it has played out in terms of the massive humanitarian conditions in Gaza. Will you help lead the world in responding to those humanitarian conditions?” Merkley asked, while adding another question about whether Rubio would support a regional agreement aimed at pursuing a two-state solution.
Rubio did not respond directly to whether he would seek to ease the suffering in Gaza, pivoting instead to express support for the ceasefire. He also said the ceasefire, along with Bashar al-Assad’s flight from Syria and a new presidential administration in Lebanon, could lead to a broader, regional agreement.
“We don’t know yet for sure, but there are opportunities that exist now in the Middle East that did not exist 90 days ago,” Rubio said. “Whether it’s what’s happened in Lebanon, whether it’s what happened in Syria, whether it’s hopefully what will happen with the ceasefire and the release of hostages after horrifying detentions.”
El-Tayyab, who helped rally support for the trio of resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., last year to block shipments of weapons to Israel, said it was not surprising that longtime, staunch supporter of Israel would adopt such a stance.
Still, the very ceasefire agreement blessed by Rubio could live or die on whether the U.S. is willing to police Israeli violations of the pact, he said.
“I didn’t see anything by Rubio in that hearing that said he is willing to exert any amount of leverage with the Israel government should this go sideways,” El-Tayyab said, “which I think is going to be really important, because there are so many things that could go wrong here.”
The two men who carried out apparent terror attacks on New Year’s Day — killing 15 people by plowing a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers in New Orleans, and detonating a Tesla Cybertruck outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas — both had U.S. military backgrounds, according to the Pentagon.
From 1990 to 2010, about seven persons per year with U.S. military backgrounds committed extremist crimes. Since 2011, that number has jumped to almost 45 per year, according to data from a new, unreleased report shared with The Intercept by Michael Jensen, the research director at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland.
Military service is also the single strongest individual predictor of becoming a “mass casualty offender,” far outpacing mental health issues, according to a separate study of extremist mass casualty violence by the researchers.
From 1990 through 2023, 730 individuals with U.S. military backgrounds committed criminal acts that were motivated by their political, economic, social, or religious goals, according to data from the new START report. From 1990 to 2022, successful violent plots that included perpetrators with a connection to the U.S. military resulted in 314 deaths and 1,978 injuries — a significant number of which came from the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
In the latest attacks, the FBI identified 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar as the man who rammed a pickup into New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, early on Wednesday morning. At least 15 people were killed and 35 more were injured.
The U.S. Army said Jabbar served as a human resource specialist and an information technology specialist between 2007 and 2020. His service included a deployment to Afghanistan from February 2009 to January 2010. A staff sergeant at the end of his service, Jabbar was “inspired by” the Islamic State terrorist organization, according to a short address by President Joe Biden on Wednesday night, who added that, in videos posted to social media shortly before the attack, Jabbar indicated that he had a “desire to kill.” The FBI said it did not believe he was solely responsible for the attack and said the investigation was “live.”
Authorities are also investigating whether the terrorist attack in New Orleans is linked to the Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas which killed the attacker, Matthew Livelsberger, and wounded seven bystanders. The U.S. Army told The Intercept that Master Sgt. Matthew Alan Livelsberger served in the active-duty Army from January 2006 to March 2011, then served in the National Guard from March 2011 to July 2012, followed by a stint in the Army Reserve from July 2012 to December 2012. That same month, he rejoined the Army, serving as a U.S. Army Special Operations Soldier.
Livelsberger was assigned to U.S. Army Special Operations Command and still serving in the military, though on approved leave, at the time of his death.
In the years 1990 to 2022, 170 individuals with U.S. military backgrounds plotted 144 individual mass casualty terrorist attacks in the United States, according to START research using the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States, or PIRUS, database, which includes information on more than 3,000 subjects who committed extremist crimes in America. These troops and veterans represent approximately one-quarter of all individuals who plotted mass casualty extremist attacks during this span, outstripping their representation in the U.S. population.
Jensen and his colleagues found that while military personnel and veterans are not more likely to radicalize to the point of violence than members of the general public, when service members and veterans do become radicalized, “they may be more likely to plan for, or commit, mass casualty crimes, thus having an outsized impact on public safety.”
The researchers also determined that subjects “in PIRUS with U.S. military backgrounds are 2.41 times more likely to be classified as mass casualty offenders than individuals who did not serve in the armed forces.” This means that U.S. military service is a more reliable predictor for becoming a mass casualty offender than mental health issues, being a lone offender, or having a pre-radicalization criminal history.
Most mass casualty offenders with U.S. military backgrounds in PIRUS (73.5 percent) were associated with far-right domestic extremist groups and movements. Approximately 15 percent (24 offenders) were inspired by or connected to foreign Islamist extremist groups, such as Al Qaeda and its affiliates (9 subjects) or the Islamic State or ISIS (13 subjects).
Law enforcement sources confirmed to local news outlets that Livelsberger’s weaponized Tesla Cybertruck was rented from Turo, the vehicle-sharing service that was also used in the New Orleans attack. Jabbar reportedly used the Turo app as well to rent the electric Ford pickup truck used in that attack.
Both Livelsberger and Jabbar spent time at the military base formerly known as Fort Bragg and now called Fort Liberty, a massive Army garrison in North Carolina that is home to multiple Army Special Operations units. It does not, however, appear that their assignments to the base overlapped.
Fort Liberty is, however, an exceptionally troubled Army base. Investigations found, for example, that 109 soldiers assigned there died in 2020 and 2021. Ninety-six percent of those deaths took place stateside. Fewer than 20 were from natural causes. The remaining soldier fatalities, including macabre or unexplained deaths, homicides, and dozens of drug overdoses, were preventable.
Seventy-six of the 170 mass casualty offenders (44.7 percent) in PIRUS with military backgrounds served in the Army. These soldiers and veterans represent more than half (52.4 percent) of all Army-affiliated individuals represented in the data, which is the highest ratio of mass casualty to non-mass casualty offenders for any one military service branch. By comparison, 32 percent of the individuals represented in the data who served in the Marine Corps were mass casualty offenders.
“The Army is a vast organization with all kinds of different people and all kinds of different training and experiences,” said Joel A. Dvoskin, a clinical and forensic psychologist and an expert on violence, who cautioned against drawing any early conclusions about the relationship between the attacks and the attackers’ military service records. He said data on the relationship between military service and mass casualty attacks should only be used for beneficial purposes, like smoothing the transition from military to civilian life.
American officials are apoplectic about alleged mystery drones flying over the United States. Last Thursday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy sent a letter to President Joe Biden, expressing “growing concern” about the drones and seeking federal help “to fully understand what is behind this activity.”
Tri-state area Democratic Sens. Cory Booker, Andy Kim, Chuck Schumer, and Kirsten Gillibrand sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Federal Aviation Administration head Michael Whitaker requesting a briefing on the supposed drones.
And, last week Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., initially suggested that the unidentified flying objects might hail from an “Iranian drone mothership” operating off the East Coast.
“Whether this is a foreign adversary or even just a group of drone hobbyists,” he said, “we cannot allow unidentified drones to operate freely in our airspace with no consequences and it is time we eliminate the threat they pose and shoot them down.”
The widespread anxiety, especially amonglawmakers, about living beneath potentially malign mystery drones is striking, given America’s proclivity for employing drones to spy on people across the world without their consent — and, in many cases, kill them. The irony is not lost on experts.
“Americans are finally seeing how uncomfortable it is to have unknown aircraft buzzing overhead.”
“After decades of the U.S. government flying armed military drones over cities and villages around the world, Americans are finally seeing how uncomfortable it is to have unknown aircraft buzzing overhead,” said Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy. “Even when drones are not killing people, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine that having an unknown aircraft hovering above your head is not something most people are comfortable with.”
“American politicians aren’t known for walking a mile in someone else’s shoes,” he said. “Hopefully, these incidents will help them realize that monitoring people this way in other countries isn’t going to win hearts and minds.”
No Explanation
For more than two decades, the United States has been flying drones over the heads of millions of people in foreign lands — remotely watching, recording, and even killing some of them. Since its first drone strikes in Afghanistan in 2001 and Yemen in 2002, U.S. drones have killed thousands of people in those countries and others, including civilians in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
Last year, an investigation by The Intercept determined that an April 2018 drone attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. For more than six years, the family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by U.S. Africa Command, but they have never received a response.
“They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, told me last year. “No one has been held accountable.”
The entire family has been traumatized. When Luul’s nephew saw a “normal airplane” flying over their farm, he began running around, trying to hide, convinced it might kill him. The family told Luul’s son, Mohamed Shilow Muse, the truth about his mother’s death and since then, when he sees or hears a drone, they said, “he rushes under a tree to hide.”
For decades, people around the world have lived with drone-induced anxieties and resounding silence from U.S. officials. Before the U.S. military was expelled from Niger by the U.S.-trained ruling junta earlier this year, it hosted U.S. drone bases whose purpose was murky and kept secret from the Nigeriens who lived beneath the unblinking gaze of America’s eyes in the sky.
In the hard-scrabble Tadress neighborhood, on the outskirts of America’s drone outpost in the northern town of Agadez, people were apprehensive when talking about “le drone” when The Intercept visited last year. Women in the neighborhood, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, complained of the noise and the fumes coming from the base — and concern about the small aircraft that took off in the dead of night.
“No one knows what they are doing. We see the red and blue blinking lights above us.”
“We’re scared,” complained a woman in a pink hijab, who had lived in the area since before the base was built. “No one knows what they are doing. We see the red and blue blinking lights above us. We don’t know what they’re looking at.”
Maria Laminou Garba, who runs a recycling collective in Tadress that pays unemployed youth to gather recyclables, expressed similar concerns of living under an American microscope. “They are always flying overhead — often in the night or early morning,” she said last year. “It’s scary. We think they are watching us.”
The reactions are justified. In Somalia, the U.S. continues to fly surveillance missions and conduct lethal airstrikes.
In Niger, drones not only searched for militants in rural areas and neighboring countries, but also provided overwatch for the Agadez outpost and troops coming and going from the base in Tadress — putting the civilians there under their gaze.
A U.S. Air Force Predator drone with a Hellfire missile attached, on Feb. 11, 2001, in an undisclosed location.U.S. Air Force/AFP via Getty Images
Everyone in the Village
Americans like Van Drew, of “Iranian drone mothership” fame, are learning what people around the world, including Luul and Mariam’s family, have been saying for years: The prospect of living beneath another country’s drones — especially lethal robot aircraft — is terrible. (Van Drew has walked back his “mothership” fearmongering but continues to express unease.)
A September 2012 study of civilians in Pakistan by Stanford Law’s International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic and the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law reported, “U.S. drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury.”
The researchers found the constant presence of drones, the fear that a strike might occur at any time, and the inability of people to protect themselves “terrorize[d] men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.”
Following a series of attacks by the U.S. — six drones strikes and one raid — that killed 36 members of two large, intermarried Yemeni families between 2013 and 2018, one family member, Abdullah Abdurabuh Obad al Taisy, told me about the psychological fallout among survivors, especially children.
“Everyone in the village is affected,” he said. “They usually can’t sleep properly because of the fear. They can’t even eat properly. Even the children are afraid to go out and play. Some of them are mentally sick right now, because of this constant feeling of fear.”
A 2015 study by the Alkarama Foundation, a human rights group, found that among Yemenis living in two villages where U.S. drones operated, post-traumatic stress disorder was “extremely prevalent,” with many suffering from constant worry and sleep disorders including nightmares or insomnia. Ninety-six percent of children interviewed said they were afraid that a drone attack might harm them, their family, or their community — with “the feeling of fear,” the study said, “further exacerbated among children when they hear sounds that resemble the buzzing of drones.”
The fear and anxiety induced by the distinctive “buzz” of drone engines is hardly confined to children. “The drones were terrifying,” wrote David Rohde, a journalist kidnapped by the Afghan Taliban in 2008 and held in the tribal areas of Pakistan. “From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”
Populations subjected to constant drone activity report “exaggerated startle responses, fleeing indoors and hiding when seeing or hearing drones, fainting, poor appetite, psychosomatic symptoms, insomnia, and startled awakening at night with hallucinations about drones,” according to a 2017 study in Current Psychology. “Civilians’ fear appears to cripple their daily activities, such as leaving their homes, working, attending social functions, and sending children to school.”
“There is a reason that privacy is regarded as a human right — because nobody wants to feel like they’re living under the Eye of Sauron.”
The psychological toll exists even when the perceived threat is merely aerial surveillance from on high.
“There is a reason that privacy is regarded as a human right — because nobody wants to feel like they’re living under the Eye of Sauron, an eye in the sky that’s monitoring things that they’re doing,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, referencing the imposing symbol of malign omniscience in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” books. “That’s something that the U.S. shouldn’t be imposing on people abroad. And it’s something that we shouldn’t tolerate in our own communities.”
The Truth Is Out There
Stanley thinks there is a good chance that many of the “drones” seen over New Jersey are conventional aircraft and, perhaps, some experimental models. The panic surrounding the sightings, however, reveals something fundamental about Americans’ anxieties.
“In my experience — working on privacy issues from internet tracking to data mining — I find aerial surveillance has a special electricity for people,” he said. “Someone tracking my financial transactions and building a profile of me is very abstract, but a flying robotic video camera hovering over my community — that’s very concrete. And it freaks people out.”
In the meantime, neither people like Luul and Mariam’s family in Somalia nor Garba, the recycling organizer in Niger, will ever get what Americans panicking over skyward objects are: reasonable assurances from the authorities that they’re perfectly safe.
Last Thursday, national security communications adviser John Kirby dismissed concerns over the drone panic.
“We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or a public safety threat or have a foreign nexus,” he said.
An FBI official reported that government investigators overlaid the locations of the reported drone sightings and found that “the density of reported sightings matches the approach pattern” of New York and New Jersey’s busiest airports. The FBI has received 5,000 tips about drones but fewer than 100 have led to legitimate leads, according to a joint statement by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA, and the Pentagon released on Monday.
“I don’t discount others may have seen actual drone activity, and not all I saw is fully explained by flight paths, but much of it was,” he announced on X, taking federal authorities to task for not adequately addressing public fears and providing detailed explanations. “Federal experts should provide information and guidance to the public including local police departments like the one that took me out to help them decipher what they are seeing.”
Kim pointed to anxieties across America that he believes are fueling the drone panic. “I think this situation in some ways reflects this moment in our country. People have a lot [of] anxiety right now about the economy, health, security etc.,” he wrote. “And too often we find that those charged with working on these issues don’t engage the public with the respect and depth needed.”
A founding member of the Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus, Kim has been outspoken on U.S. drone strikes in the past. His office, however, refused to engage on the disconnect between American drone policy abroad and the drone hysteria exhibited by officials in the United States. (“We’re not going to comment at this time,” Anna Connole, Kim’s press secretary, told The Intercept.)
“Members of Congress like Andy Kim have been rightly concerned about civilian casualties, but drones aren’t just a problem when they kill civilians,” said Sperling.
“It’s just a profoundly disturbing climate to live in, when you have an unknown, unaccountable drone hovering over your head. Members of Congress should understand that monitoring people with futuristic unmanned aircraft is not a normal state of affairs for people beneath the drones. And they should apply that realization when it comes to U.S. foreign policy.”
The U.S. Department of Defense sent over a thousand tons of ammunition to Israel on a ship that stopped at a U.S. naval base in Spain — a violation of Spain’s embargo on ships carrying military cargo bound for Israel, according to researchers from the Palestinian Youth Movement and Progressive International.
The ship, owned by Sealift Inc., was also used for delivering aid to Gaza last spring, when the U.S. carried out its disastrous and short-lived floating pier aid mission.
While partly operated by the U.S. Navy, Naval Station Rota is Spanish territory technically beholden to Spanish law. Moving ammunition bound for Israel through a U.S. Navy base on Spanish soil makes enforcement of the embargo trickier.
“Shipments through American military bases in Spain of military materials are harder to detect.”
“Shipments through American military bases in Spain of military materials, which may be used in the commission of international crimes, are harder to detect,” Enrique Santiago, a lawyer and Spanish legislator whose party is in the government coalition, told The Intercept. He said that, though Spanish oversight should apply, “in practice, American bases are beyond the reach of Spanish sovereignty.”
Santiago added, “If shipments of military material used in international crimes are made through American bases in Spain, and this fact can be evidenced, the people taking part in them would equally have criminal liability.”
The revelation that deadly ammunition is being shipped by the U.S. to Israel through Spanish ports is the latest chapter of a spiraling international row between the two allies, both members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. (Neither Sealift nor the U.S. military responded to requests for comment.)
The U.S. recently lodged a case with the Federal Maritime Commission, an independent U.S. government agency that regulates international shipping and can levy astronomical fines — potentially hitting Spain with costs that run well into the millions.
“Unending Legal Battle”
Last month, The Intercept reported that Maersk, one of the world’s largest shippers, is among the companies that delivered millions of pounds of materiel, including armored vehicles, from commercial American ports to Israel for use in the ongoing genocidal war on Gaza. A number of those shipments, which stopped in Spain, violated Spanish policy that blocked ships carrying Israeli war materiel from docking at its ports.
Following reporting in The Intercept and Spanish newspaper El Diario, Spain in recent weeks blocked two vessels from docking, forcing Maersk to reroute some of its transatlantic shipping of government and military cargo from the U.S. through Morocco. (Maersk did not respond to a question about the shipments routed through Morocco.)
Spanish officials put the embargo in place last May to end Spanish involvement in arms sales to Israel. Since then, Spain has prevented more than five vessels from docking at its ports under the policy.
“We call on the European and North African nations of conscience to deny docking or refueling to all vessels carrying ammunition or military cargo to Israel,” said Aisha Nizar a campaign organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement. “And we specifically call on the government of Spain to continue to implement the decision it made in May 2024.”
Spain’s United Left political coalition last week proposed a new protocol in the Spanish Parliament, which, if passed, would allow ships carrying military cargo to stop in Spain, but would instruct Spanish authorities to inspect the vessels and seize any Israel-bound military equipment. According to the proposed protocol, Spain would then report the ships to the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court — where Israel is facing allegations of genocide and other war crimes — as well as to the Spanish judicial system.
In response to Spain denying entry to ships, the U.S. opened an investigation in early December into whether Spain’s denials of entry to the vessels constitute a violation of maritime trade regulations. The Federal Maritime Commission, an independent body that monitors conditions that may affect shipping and U.S. international trade, said it is “concerned that this apparent policy of denying entry to certain vessels will create conditions unfavorable to shipping in the foreign trade, whether in a particular route or in commerce generally.”
“Should this happen, an unending legal battle would begin.”
If the investigation finds Spain to be in breach of the regulations, the U.S. could fine the Spanish government up to $2.3 million per voyage. In effect, the U.S.is threatening a NATO ally for upholding its own policies and attempting to comply with international humanitarian law.
“A fine imposed by the United States against a country that is abiding by its obligations to prevent a genocide is clearly an illegal and illegitimate sanction in view of international law,” said Santiago, the Spanish politician. “Should this happen, an unending legal battle would begin.”
“Moreover,” he said, “we would work for Spain to take measures to sanction all American citizens that may have taken part in this attack against international law and against Spain.”
A Million Pounds of Ammunition
In their latest report, researchers from the Palestinian-led diaspora group Palestinian Youth Movement and the left-wing umbrella coalition Progressive International traced the journey of the container ship MV Sagamore. Based on reviews of U.S. military contracts, satellite imagery, and changes in cargo weight throughout MV Sagamore’s voyages, the researchers found that the vessel has in the last year completed numerous missions carrying ammunition and other materiel to Israel from the U.S. Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point, or MOTSU, in North Carolina.
According to the report, the MV Sagamore transferred over 1 million pounds of ammunition and military cargo to Israel in just one of its shipments. The ship is owned by Sealift Inc. and chartered on behalf of the U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command.
Used for the transport of live ammunition and explosives, MOTSU is the largest military terminal in the U.S. The U.S. military’s Transportation Command website notes that the port is used for sending and receiving “military equipment like rockets, missiles, howitzers, grenades, projectiles, pyrotechnics and more” — hazardous materials that cannot be handled at commercial ports. Researchers found that the Sagamore has made six calls to MOTSU in the last year; the last journey out of MOTSU that the ship made was to Israel’s Ashdod Port.
While the military-contracted missions do not make the details of their ships’ cargo publicly available, using an array of evidence, the researchers wrote that they can conclude with “a very high degree of certainty, that … [is the] vessel that delivered over a thousand tonnes of Class 1 explosive ammunition to Israel this winter as it currently conducts its war against Gaza.”
Researchers with the Palestinian Youth Movement said that the MV Sagamore was also used for the U.S. military’s floating pier in Gaza to deliver aid to Gaza between May and July 2024. The pier was the Biden administration’s ill-conceived and costly gesture for delivering humanitarian aid to the bombarded Strip, as Israel blocked aid by land. The temporary dock cost $230 million and delivered about a day’s worth of aid to Palestinians in Gaza.
The pier was dismantled after 20 days in use, following damage due to bad weather. Video evidence also appeared to show that the pier, intended for delivering aid, was used by the U.S. military to assist Israeli soldiers in the June Nuseirat refugee camp massacre, in which the Israeli military killed over 275 Palestinians, including dozens of children, and extracted four Israeli hostages. (The U.S. denied that the pier was for the operation.)
To deliver aid through the temporary pier, the MV Sagamore picked up food aid in Cyprus and delivered it to the Port of Ashdod; the goods were then transported by truck to the floating dock. Researchers found that, while the vessel was contracted to deliver aid, it was concurrently under contract with the U.S. to deliver ammunition, though the contracts did not specify the recipients.
While the researchers could not conclude that the ship carried aid and weapons to Israel during the same voyage, the report said, “A review of the federal DoD contract data and vessel travel data complicates the publicly-stated narrative that the MV Sagamore was engaged in simple humanitarian aid transfers.”
MV Sagamore’s journeys, as detailed in the report, included a voyage on which the ship loaded vast weights of materiel at the North Carolina military terminal, then stopped at a joint U.S.–Spain operated military port in Spain, before heading to Israel to unload the cargo.
The CIA analyst accused of leaking top secret documents about Israel’s war plans against Iran must stay in jail ahead of trial, a federal judge said Wednesday. The judge sided with prosecutors’ claims that the analyst could make further disclosures affecting events in the turbulent Middle East if he was free before his trial on two Espionage Act counts.
“You can’t stop them from talking — and even talking is a danger here.”
U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles’s order to hold Asif William Rahman reversed a magistrate judge’s decision last week to grant pretrial release on the grounds that Rahman could safely be released to home detention with his family.
Giles said the concern that Rahman could make further leaks — the central debate between the government and Rahman’s lawyers on Wednesday — weighed heavily on her decision. Even if he were banned from accessing electronic devices at his father’s house in suburban Maryland, Giles said, Rahman could still find other ways of distributing top secret information.
“I mean, it’s one thing to limit someone’s computer access, but you can’t stop them from talking — and even talking is a danger here,” she said. “There is no family that I would trust the safety of our community, of our national security, to.”
The decision could change the calculus for Rahman and his defense attorneys as they fight Espionage Act charges that carry long prison sentences. Defense lawyer Amy Jeffress said she would appeal the ruling.
The documents allegedly released by Rahman were analyses by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which commands powerful satellite photography capabilities, of Israel’s preparations for a strike against Iran. Israel was making the preparations as part of the widening regional war over its assault on the Gaza Strip; steadily rising tensions between Iran and Israel have led to exchanges of long-range attacks.
In court last week, a federal prosecutor said those documents’ release delayed Israel’s attack, which ultimately took place October 26.
In a shift for prosecutors, who have not previously made assertions about Rahman’s motive, Assistant U.S. Attorney Troy Edwards said Wednesday that “ideology” appeared to have spurred the CIA analyst to action.
The very fact that the documents gained widespread attention after being posted on a pro-Iranian Telegram channel suggested that Rahman was ideologically motivated, Edwards said. As evidence, he pointed to the reception that the documents drew on social media, with one user claiming that they might help halt “World War III.”
Because of Rahman’s alleged motive, Edwards said, “there is an ongoing incentive for the defendant to continue to reveal what he knows.”
“He has no access now to any information — other than what’s in his head.”
Defense lawyers said that the government does not have any proof that Rahman, if he is the leaker, could make further disclosures.
“He has no access now to any information — other than what’s in his head,” said Jeffress, Rahman’s attorney.
Jeffress also pushed back on the idea that the disclosures had an earth-shattering impact, pointing in a court filing to anonymous Israeli officials who downplayed their significance in comments to news media.
Jeffress argued that if he were jailed, Rahman would be the first alleged leaker to receive a detention order in the court district where his case is filed.
She also said that prosecutors’ supposedly bulletproof evidence that Rahman was the leaker is not as strong as they have made it out to be. Rahman was tied to the leaks by virtue of having been the only government employee to print out the documents in question, but Jeffress said it was part of his job to print such documents out for a physical briefing book at the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia, which could be accessed by others.
Rahman, clad in a green Alexandria jail jumpsuit, turned and nodded to his family as he was led out of the courtroom by security officers.
A rebel blitzkrieg against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in northwestern Syria reignited that nation’s dormant civil war last week, when a coalition of militant groups united behind Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — a former Al Qaeda affiliate known as the Al Nusra Front that the U.S. considers a terrorist group — and captured Syria’s largest city, Aleppo. The rebel army, which include Turkish-backed forces, have since pushed government troops out of Hama, another major metropolis.
For years, Syria’s complicated battlefields have been populated by shifting groups of militants battling a range of enemies, including each other, and proxies backed by outside powers. Iran and Russia have propped up the autocratic Assad regime for more than a decade, while Turkey and the United States have troops on the ground in areas outside government control, and each support local proxies.
News reports and videos posted on social media indicate U.S.-backed rebels, supported by American airstrikes, may now be battling Syrian government forces as part of renewed fighting in the east.
That U.S. backing means boots on the ground. Around 900 U.S. troops are deployed in Syria alongside private military contractors, in what one expert calls “arguably the most expansive abuse” of the war powers granted to the executive branch in the wake of 9/11 — and those troops have, on average, come under fire multiple times each week since last October, according to new Pentagon statistics obtained by The Intercept.
Since the war in Gaza began last year, U.S. forces have been under sustained attack by Iran-backed militants across the Middle East, with the Pentagon’s Syrian bases being the hardest hit. Since October 18, 2023, there have been at least 127 attacks on U.S. forces in Syria, according to Lt. Cmdr. Patricia Kreuzberger, a Pentagon spokesperson, and information supplied by U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM. On average, that’s about one attack every three days.
“Why are U.S. troops in Syria? What is the mission? What is the endgame? And is this legally authorized?”
Mission Support Site Conoco — also known as Mission Support Site Euphrates — located near a gas field in northeastern Syria, has been attacked about 40 times since last October, according to a “defense official” who would only agree to speak on background using that moniker.
Another Pentagon source confirmed that several U.S. troops are currently being evaluated for potential traumatic brain injuries after incoming mortar rounds landed near that base in eastern Deir Ezzor on Tuesday.
Documents provided by another Pentagon official, on the condition of anonymity, show that still another U.S. base, Mission Support Site Green Village, has been attacked at least 28 times. Last month, U.S. troops came under rocket attack at Patrol Base Shaddadi, one of at least 22 attacks on the small outpost since last October. There have also been at least 11 attacks on al-Tanf, a small garrison near the Iraq and Jordanian borders in southeast Syria.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer now with the International Crisis Group, said the ongoing bombardment of U.S. bases should prompt hard questions in America’s halls of power. “Why are U.S. troops in Syria? What is the mission? What is the endgame? And is this legally authorized?” are the questions that need answers, he said. “The administration doesn’t want to have that debate. Congress also seems perfectly fine avoiding it. And so, the legislative and executive branches are content to muddle along, avoiding their constitutional responsibilities — the need for congressional authorization — and really debate the merits of this conflict.”
The U.S. military has been conducting operations in Syria since 2014. America’s bases there and in neighboring Iraq ostensibly exist to conduct “counter-ISIS missions,” despite the fact that the Pentagon concluded in 2021 that the Islamic State in Syria “probably lacks the capability to target the U.S. homeland.”
Around 900 U.S. troops — including commandos from Combined Special Operations Joint Task Force-Levant — and an undisclosed number of private military contractors are operating in Syria. In 2022, The Intercept revealed the existence of a low-profile 127-echo counterterrorism program in Syria targeting Islamist militants. Under the 127e authority, U.S. Special Operations forces arm, train, and provide intelligence to small groups of elite foreign troops. But unlike traditional foreign assistance programs, which are primarily intended to build local capacity, 127e partners are dispatched on U.S.-directed missions, targeting U.S. enemies to achieve U.S. aims.
The Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led militant group based in the country’s northeast is America’s main proxy force in Syria. While the SDF fights Islamist extremists with U.S. support, it also battles Turkey and Turkish-backed militants. Turkey, America’s longtime NATO ally, opposes the SDF due to that group’s ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a Kurdish nationalist militant group that both the Turkish and U.S. governments, among others, have designated a terrorist group.
For many years, the SDF has been implicated in widespread human rights violations. The most recent State Department report on human rights in Syria notes that members of the group have been involved in “abuses involving attacks striking residential areas, physical abuse, unjust detention, recruitment or use of child soldiers, restrictions on expression and assembly, and destruction and demolition of homes.”
In the last week, the SDF appears to have also launched an offensive against Syrian government troops. Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder announced that the United States was “in no way involved in the operations you see playing out in and around Aleppo in northwestern Syria.” What’s less clear is whether the U.S. is aiding an opportunistic SDF offensive in the east of the country. This week, in a press release, the SDF announced efforts to safeguard a number of villages around the town of Deir Ezzor “in light of the serious security situation arising from recent developments in western Syria.” Videos also emerged on social media showing purported U.S. airstrikes in Deir Ezzor supporting SDF ground forces battling Assad regime troops.
“[F]ighters from a U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led coalition battled government forces in the northeast, both sides said, opening a new front along a vital supply route,” according to Reuters.
The Pentagon did not respond to The Intercept’s repeated requests for comment on such reports.
The future of America’s escalating war in Syria may face renewed scrutiny early next year. President-elect Donald Trump showed antipathy to the U.S. war in Syria and withdrew U.S. forces from the north of the country in 2019, opening the door to a Turkish invasion.
“When Trump ordered the removal of U.S. forces from Syria in late 2018, there was a scramble within the government to try to figure out what that meant and whether there were ways to walk it back,” said Finucane, the former State Department lawyer. “The Pentagon was fine to pull out U.S. troops from al Tanf because there was really no counter-ISIS mission. But in his memoir, [Trump’s national security adviser] John Bolton said he wanted to keep troops there to counter Iran.”
For four years, experts say the Biden administration has continued this shadow effort aimed at Iran under the guise of a counter-ISIS mission, fending off several congressional efforts to force the removal of U.S. troops from Syria. Last year, a bid by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to compel the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Syria within 30 days also failed. “The American people have had enough of endless wars in the Middle East,” Paul told The Intercept at the time. “Yet, 900 U.S. troops remain in Syria with no vital U.S. interest at stake, no definition of victory, no exit strategy, and no congressional authorization to be there.” Those troops may be increasingly drawn into the Syrian civil war in support of their SDF allies.
“This is arguably the most expansive abuse of the 2001 AUMF in the history of the law,” said Erik Sperling of Just Foreign Policy, an advocacy group critical of mainstream Washington foreign policy, referring to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, enacted in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “We know from Biden administration leaks that the U.S. presence in Syria was part of an anti-Iran proxy war strategy but after Congress started voting to remove troops, they cracked down on those leaks and they said it’s only about terrorism.”
Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, reiterated this talking point on Monday, following a U.S. strike on a “hostile target” supposedly threatening U.S. and coalition forces at Mission Support Site Euphrates, noting that U.S. forces in Syria are “singularly focused on the enduring defeat of ISIS.”
Following an attack on U.S. personnel in Syria on November 25, the U.S. responded in typical fashion: with a strike against an Iranian-backed militia group, along with tough talk. “As previously stated, we will not tolerate any attacks on our personnel and coalition partners. We are committed to taking all necessary actions to ensure their protection,” said CENTCOM commander Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla.
U.S. troops have, however, been relentlessly attacked across the Middle East since last October. There have been at least 208 attacks against U.S. forces in the region — two in Jordan, 79 in Iraq, and 127 in Syria — according to Kreuzberger and CENTCOM. In addition to coming under fire about once every other day, U.S. troops have been killed or seriously injured in these attacks. In January, three U.S. soldiers were killed and more than 40 other personnel were injured in an attack on a base in Jordan near the Syrian border. Eight U.S. troops also suffered traumatic brain injuries and smoke inhalation from an August 9 drone attack on the Rumalyn Landing Zone in northeastern Syria.
“There were deliberations within the Biden administration prior to October 2023 about redeploying some of the U.S. forces in Syria, particularly from al Tanf,” said Finucane. “But once U.S. troops started taking fire, the deliberations came to a halt because the U.S. doesn’t want to be perceived as removing troops because they were under attack.”
Keeping military personnel in harm’s way for the sake of foreign policy credibility has become increasingly risky with the Gaza war and the flare-up of the Syrian civil war.
“As the U.S. and Israel have escalated conflicts in the region, it’s put U.S. troops in Syria in further danger.”
“It’s clear that as the U.S. and Israel have escalated conflicts in the region, it’s put U.S. troops in Syria in further danger. They are sitting ducks for U.S. ‘adversaries,’” said Sperling, a former congressional staffer who has worked on Syria policy for over a decade. “There are times when it’s worth it for U. S. service members’ lives to be put at risk. That’s why you have a military. But that’s also the reason that the framers of the Constitution said that Congress has the power to declare war. There needs to be a debate and vote.”
Trump has signaled he wants to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump has tapped to be his secretary of health and human services. “Get them out!” Trump reportedly said.
“The Biden administration never put the war in Syria up for debate because they know the American people don’t want another war in the Middle East. They know there is no popular support for putting U.S. troops at risk for this. That’s extremely undemocratic and immoral,” said Sperling, who noted that the president-elect has an opportunity to change course. “Many of Trump’s advisors will try to drag him deeper into this regional conflict in the Middle East. His legacy is going to hinge on whether he keeps his campaign promise to be an anti-war president. He can start with Syria.”
A federal jury held a defense contractor legally responsible for contributing to the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib for the first time on Tuesday.
The jury awarded a total of $42 million to three Iraqi men — a journalist, a middle school principal, and fruit vendor — who were held at the notorious prison two decades ago. The plaintiffs’ suit accused Virginia-based CACI, which was hired by the U.S. government to provide interrogation services at Abu Ghraib, of conspiring with American soldiers to torture detainees.
Tuesday’s verdict marks a rare victory for plaintiffs seeking to bring American corporations to justice for playing a part in the country’s so-called war on terror.
“What the jury did today is send a very clear message that the contractors who go to war or go work with the government overseas, they will be held accountable for their role in whatever violations their employees may commit,” said Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the plaintiffs, at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon. “They need to have far better oversight over their employees to ensure that something like what happened at Abu Ghraib never happens again.”
The case hinged largely on the legal definition of conspiracy, which doesn’t require an overt act but can also include cooperation with others engaging in torture, said Stjepan Meštrović, a sociology professor at Texas A&M University and expert witness in multiple courts-martial of soldiers who served at Abu Ghraib. “This ruling opens the door to future findings of responsibility based upon conspiracy to commit war crimes by civilian contractors and other adjuncts to military forces,” he said in an emailed statement.
CACI had argued that while abuses did occur at Abu Ghraib, it was ultimately the Army who was responsible for this conduct, even if CACI employees may have been involved. The defense contractor also argued there was no definitive evidence that their staff abused the three Iraqi men who filed the case — and that it could have been American soldiers who tortured them. The jury did not find that argument persuasive.
A lawyer for CACI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The monetary compensation for plaintiffs includes $3 million each for compensatory damages and $11 million each for punitive damages. Their lawyers say that’s what they requested. Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a press conference on Tuesday that the verdict “sends a strong message that this kind of corporate malfeasance and neglect and recklessness and deflection is outrageous and deserves to be punished.”
The case was filed 16 years ago but got caught up in procedural hurdles, as CACI tried more than 20 times to dismiss the lawsuit. November’s case was a retrial; in an initial trial in April, jurors were deadlocked following more than a week of deliberations. The judge declared a mistrial. That trial, earlier this year, also marked the first time that an American jury heard directly from Iraqis who were detained at Abu Ghraib.
The lawsuit was first brought in 2008 under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows noncitizens to bring cases involving clear violations of international law, such as torture, to an American federal court when there’s a substantial connection to the U.S. “It was the United States that invaded Iraq, it was the United States that detained our clients, and it was a US company that profited from their torture and abuse,” Gallagher said in Tuesday’s press conference.
That Al Shimari v. CACI survived so many procedural hurdles is impressive, notes Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford University, in an emailed statement. In recent years, the Supreme Court has made it harder for cases involving national security concerns to get a trial. “It’s exceedingly rare for torture survivors or other human rights victims of the U.S. global war on terror to prevail in U.S. courts, whether against government officials or military contractors,” Sinnar wrote. “The Supreme Court has made it incredibly difficult to hold the national security state accountable in court. So this victory is exceptional in every sense of the term.”
“The American public is putting its government and its contractors on notice.”
It’s also notable that an American jury sided with the Iraqi men against an American military contractor, says Yumna Rizvi, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Victims of Torture, an international nonprofit. “It shows that they’re clearly not in lockstep with the decisions of their government,” Rizvi said. “The American public is putting its government and its contractors on notice that, ‘We see you and we don’t agree with what you’ve done or are doing.’”
Rizvi wonders about the precedent that could have been set for other cases if plaintiffs had been able to go to trial earlier. “You can’t just go around destroying people’s bodies and spirits and minds and just walk away from it,” she said. “Unfortunately, that’s what we’ve seen for too long in the U.S. war on terror and how the U.S. has behaved around the world.”
The plaintiffs — Suhail Najim Abdullah Al Shimari, Salah Hasan Nusaif Al-Ejaili, and Asa’ad Hamza Hanfoosh Zuba’e — had testified about facing sexual abuse and harassment, as well as being beaten and threatened with dogs at Abu Ghraib in the early 2000s. “My body was like a machine, responding to all external orders,” Al-Ejaili, a former journalist with Al Jazeera, had previously said. “The only part I owned was my brain, which could not be stopped by the black plastic bag they used to cover my head.”
Al-Ejaili flew to the U.S. to be present for both trials, but he first heard the jury’s verdict while he was at home with his family in Sweden. On Tuesday, he was expecting a call from Azmy notifying him about the jury’s decision. When his phone rang, Azmy’s first words were: “Salah, we won.”
